Transferring file to local machine when SSHing into a foreign box

[Ángel González]

On 14/05/12 09:02, John Olsson M wrote:
>> I imagine something like this:
>> The user would run a command such as the following:
>> remoteServer$ cp2local someFile.c
>> The SSH server on the remote host would then push the file to the
>> SSH client running locally just as if scp had been used, but it
>> would reuse the existing connection. The local SSH client would
>> then write the file just as it would have had scp been used.
> You also need to consider the case where the user is *not* running a normal (like TCSH, Bash, ZSH, ...) shell on the server and where the file system is exposed as a virtual filesystem via SFTP (which might run in another chrooted directory than the SSH subsystem).
>
> What would a path to a local file look like in this context?
>
> I see this as a security hole since you suddenly get acess to files via SSH which you do not get access to via SFTP (since it is chrooted)...
>
> /John
If you have shell in the server, and are able to run the cp2local
command, you could presumably also run cat <file> and copy files that
way. So not really a security hole.
But you raise a good point in that opening a sftp connection in the same
ssh session may not be equivalent to the view through the shell.
Maybe cp2local should simply pass the descriptor to a unix socket (or
equivalent, the cp2local connection would be obsiously implementation
defined).