Does a known security issue allow ssh login via system accounts?

[Michael Ströder]

On 3/7/22 18:29, Brian Candler wrote:
> On 07/03/2022 16:38, Michael Ströder wrote:
>> libpam-google-auth and other similar PAM modules require to store the 
>> token's shared secrets on the server. If your system gets hacked and 
>> shared secrets are stolen the attacker can generate an arbitrary 
>> amount of valid OTP values. And if you use the same shared secrets on 
>> multiple servers the security impact will be broad.
>>
>> => Don't use that. 
> 
> That's a nice thing about pam_yubico with real Yubikeys: they can be 
> validated against the Yubico cloud API, without any local secrets.

1. I'd never want to use tokens pre-provisioned tokens with admins' 
shared secrets stored in the cloud and reach out to it via Internet from 
every internal server.
Shameless plug: I'm using my own OATH-LDAP with shared secrets stored 
encrypted in OpenLDAP, but not for SSH (see 3.).

2. Consider availability issues: In case of urgent admin SSH access your 
infrastructure might be (partially) broken and Yubico's cloud unreachable.

3. Furthermore any OTP mechanism is not really usable when using tools 
like ansible or similar in mass deployments.

BTW: Using keys on hardware tokens including U2F/Fido is also too slow 
if you initially connect to thousands of machines.

=> Use an SSH-CA which issues short-term user certs.

Ciao, Michael.