A question about LDAP Public Key authentication with openssh 9.8p1

[Qingtao Cao]

Thank you Brian for your prompt response, much appreciated!

Yes, your question just helps me connect dots together. On my device using
musl there is no nss-ldap support, no wonder the getpwnam() will return
NULL since remote-only users don't exist locally.

Since there is no nss-ldap (not to mention sssd), a separate PAM module has
been used once the public key authentication is a success, to allocate an
unused uid/gid for the remote user, also creating its home directory (which
are all specified on the LDAP server but there is no nss-ldap to fetch
these configuration) so that the remote-only user can login successfully.

Ok, setting authctxt->valid = 1 for invalid user just fakes it to be valid
so as to perform public key authentication, which is just a workaround for
the lack of nss-ldap to do username mapping. But will this bring about any
unexpected vulnerability? the public key authentication will still be
performed by the sshd server anyway. If the sshd security is jeopardized I
guess there is no way out but to integrate nss-ldap.

Thanks again!
Harry

On Sat, Oct 12, 2024 at 9:13 PM Brian Candler <b.candler at pobox.com> wrote:

> On 12/10/2024 12:04, Qingtao Cao wrote:
>
> 4. Putting the #2 and #3 points above together, that "goto out;" line will
> make the non-local user unable to login the device, despite of the fact
> that its RSA public key has been setup properly on the remote LDAP server
>
> Suppose that user were allowed to login: what UID, GID and home directory
> would you expect them to be assigned?
>
> Don't you still need something like nss_ldap or sssd to perform the
> username mapping? And if you had that, getpwnam() would not return NULL.
>