This tool allows to use pairing (like bluetooth, kde connect, ...) for exchanging public SSH keys, basically as alternative to ssh-copy-id.
With this, setting up SSH authentication is more user friendly, as the user's public key does not need to be transferred to the server manually.
It is arguably also more secure, as no passwords are involved, not even temporarily just to be able to ssh-copy-id.
ssh-pairing-server is designed to be used as part of some CLI or TUI like the bundled ssh-pairing tool, but can also be used manually.
meson and libssh are needed for building.
To use the ssh-pairing tool, dialog is needed during runtime.
> meson setup build
> ninja -C build install
On the server, run ssh-pairing as root. It will pause a possibly running sshd.service, show all needed info for establishing a connection from a client and allow importing keys individually.
Exit status: 0 if at least one key was imported. 1 if an error occured. 2 if no keys were selected for import.
On the server, display the IP address (or hostname) and the host key fingerprints, stop sshd if necessary, then start ssh-pairing-server:
> hostname -I # Get IP(s) to connect to
10.168.7.84
# Print host keys for verification
> for i in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_*key.pub; do ssh-keygen -l -f "$i"; done | awk '{ print $2" "$4 }'
SHA256:L1fVseOYAAAyufsAskcWeKDgAlE4KJ9uCIIly0RXk3I (ECDSA)
SHA256:68fgeoCzfSPPTLbSW272DnLYER2Z9S3w8h2GDEcjg7c (ED25519)
SHA256:MTg iT5vx0JojrBuOTrN4/MdDv0kL390byaC5iPHymE (RSA)
> systemctl stop sshd # Stop sshd if running to free port 22
> sudo ssh-pairing-server
(no output yet)
On the client, connect to the server, compare the host key and confirm if they match. This validates the identity of the host to the client.
> ssh -oUserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null 10.168.7.84
The authenticity of host '10.168.7.84 (10.168.7.84)' can't be established.
ED25519 key fingerprint is SHA256:68fgeoCzfSPPTLbSW272DnLYER2Z9S3w8h2GDEcjg7c.
This key is not known by any other names.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])? yes
Warning: Permanently added '10.168.7.84' (ED25519) to the list of known hosts.
ssh-pairing: Received 3 public keys
Connection reset by 10.168.7.84 port 22
It's important to look for the ssh-pairing: Received X public keys message, which confirms that this particular connection got accepted by ssh-pairing-server.
On the server side, the received public keys were printed and the server exited. If sshd was stopped previously, it can be started again. The keys from the ssh-pairing-server output can be appended to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys for any user.
> sudo ssh-pairing-server
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1[...]2kmUzqvo6z4Po8= [email protected]
ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1[...]yRQQ77meqkf [email protected]
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1[...]FTVrVbxNMPsago7 [email protected]
> systemctl start sshd # If stopped previously
Note: Do not write the output of ssh-pairing-server into ~/ssh/authorized_keys directly in case someone else attempts to connect. To protect against this, only a single client can connect and get the success message saying "Received X public keys". A full UI must ask the user for confirmation on the server after connection.
When connecting to an SSH server, the SSH client offers all available public keys to the server and asks whether they can be used for authentication. If none of them are accepted, it falls back to other authentication methods like keyboard-interactive.
This tool uses libssh to implement an SSH server using the real host key of the SSH server and listens on the target port on the server. It records all public keys offered by the client to write them to stdout later, in a format suitable for authorized_keys. When the client falls back to keyboard-interactive, the server sends a status message to the client and ends the connection.
The "comment" field for each key in the output consists of the requested target user (defaults to the username of the client if not specified) and the IP address of the client.
Goal of the tool is secure bidirectional key exchange, i.e. afterwards the client can verify the server based on the server's host keys and the server can allow authentication based on the client user's keys.
As first step, the host keys are displayed (in hash format as well as randomart) alongside the connection instructions. The client needs to verify the server's host key matches one of the displayed ones during the initial connection. After successful verification, this is persisted in the client's known_host config (completing half of the key exchange already) and prevents MITM attacks.
Next step is to verify the client's identity to the server. During pairing, the server waits for a single connection for accepting public keys. This might not be the intended client, but instead any random (even malicious) connection attempt. To be able to detect that, the client which got its public keys read by ssh-pairing-server receives a distinguishable success message from the server (ssh-pairing: Received X public keys) before the connection is closed. Receiving this message from the server (whose identity is validated by the host key verification) means that ssh-pairing-server received the keys from this particular client. If this message is not displayed on the client (for whatever reason), the process needs to be started over.
For maximum trust, ideally the fingerprints of the to-be-added public keys on the server side are also interactively compared against the fingerprints on the client system.