[PATCH] U2F support in OpenSSH

[Michael Stapelberg]

Hey,

Judging from the (private) responses I’ve got, there is quite a bit of
interest in the U2F feature I proposed a while ago. Therefore, I’ve taken
some time to resolve the remaining issues, and I think the resulting patch
(attached to this email) is in quite a good state now.

I also posted the new version of the patch to
https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2319 (which I’ve opened based
on Damien Miller’s request).

In case you’re interested, please feel free to try the patch. I’m happy for
any feedback. All you need is libu2f-host installed and a clean copy of
OpenSSH 6.7p1. Apply the attached patch, delete configure, use autoreconf
-i to regenerate it, then run ./configure --with-u2f and compile OpenSSH.

Afterwards, follow the patch description/manpages to see how it works.
Quote from the description follows:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Recently, the FIDO alliance announced U2F [1], and Google announced
that it supports U2F tokens (“security keys”) for Google accounts [2].
As the spec is not a very short read, I gave a presentation last week
about U2F which may be a good quick introduction to the details [3].

For the rest of this description, I’ll assume that you read either my
presentation or the U2F spec. (side note: I’m not working on U2F,
playing around with it and implementing it in OpenSSH is my private
fun project :))

This commit adds U2F support to OpenSSH. More specifically, it adds an
authentication mechanism called “u2f”, together with the ssh-u2f key
format.

The new u2f authentication mechanism can operate in two modes, specified
by the client with the U2FMode option: registration (necessary once per
U2F security key) or authentication (the default).

Since U2F is a two-factor authentication mechanism, you should never use
it as the sole AuthenticationMethod. Therefore, whenever you enable
U2FAuthentication, please also set AuthenticationMethods on the server.
As an example, add the following to your sshd_config:

  U2FAuthentication yes
  AuthenticationMethods publickey,u2f

(This assumes that you always enter your passphrase for the pubkey,
 otherwise perhaps AuthenticationMethods password,u2f would be a better
 choice — YMMV.)

For users without an ssh-u2f key in their authorized_keys file, this is
a noop and will not change behavior — the u2f authentication method will
just always report success in this case.

For users with at least one ssh-u2f key in their authorized_keys, the
user must have the U2F security key in order to login. The server will
send a challenge, and ssh(1) on the user’s machine will ask the user to
touch the U2F security key. Upon being touched, the U2F security key
cryptographically signs the challenge, and the server can verify that
the registered security key is indeed present.

To register a U2F security key, use:

  ssh -o U2FMode=registration my.server.example > /tmp/u2f-key.pub

Now append the contents of /tmp/u2f-key.pub to your authorized_keys file
on the server.

>From now on, you should be prompted to touch the registered U2F security
key after successful publickey authentication.

In case you want to register another U2F security key, just repeat the
process.

Thanks to Thomas Habets, Christian Svensson and Axel Wagner for their
support in implementing/discussing/testing this feature.

[1] https://fidoalliance.org/
[2]
http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.ch/2014/10/strengthening-2-step-verification-with.html
[3] https://www.noname-ev.de/w/File:C14h-u2f-how-security-keys-work.pdf

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best regards,
Michael
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 0001-Implement-U2F-support-with-u2f-requires-libu2f-host.patch
Type: text/x-patch
Size: 58460 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.mindrot.org/pipermail/openssh-unix-dev/attachments/20141224/7a591785/attachment-0001.bin>