Re: OFF-TOPIC: SSH authn over TLS?

[Felipe Gasper <felipe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Aris,

I got a proof-of-concept up of a workflow that uses libssh to do key exchange and then public key authn on preexisting sockets, then drops the SSH session entirely, leaving the preexisting sockets up. That may be what we end up doing.

It would be much simpler just to do:

- Server sends a secret.
- Client signs the secret, sends the signature and key.
- Server verifies the signature on the key, and the key’s authz on the account.

… which would seem to thwart replay attacks, but I’m not sure what else we’d be missing, and we’d be “on the hook” for maintaining basically our own custom “pseudo-SSH”, which doesn’t sound very appetizing.

TLS client certs would involve setting up a CA or using a commercial one, both of which sound like workflow problems.

Anyhow, thank you for your response!

-FG


> On Jun 30, 2020, at 2:04 PM, Aris Adamantiadis <aris@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> Hi Felipe,
> 
> In SSH, all authentication schemes are signature-based. Specifically user authentication is based on signing the master hash that's derived from key exchange (i.e. everything that was shared by peers + shared secret). SSH ensures that the authentication is safe because it's impossible for either party to replay or precompute that hash. I don't think TLS would let you extract or derive secrets based on the session's secret. You could craft an authentication protocol inspired by SSH on top of TLS but you'd have to ensure that the challenges are immune to replay, but in that case it wouldn't be simple anymore.
> 
> TLS has built-in support for client certificates. It's not very straightforward but it might be the way to go if you insist on having public key authentication.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Aris
> 
> Le 30/06/20 à 01:50, Felipe Gasper a écrit :
>> Hello,
>> 
>> 	I want to rig up a simple authentication based on SSH keys but over a preexisting TLS connection.
>> 
>> 	Since TLS already handles the encryption, would the authentication be as simple as verifying a decode of a string that the public key encodes?
>> 
>> 	Is there any prior art for this?
>> 
>> 	(I realize this isn’t really on-topic for this list, but I’m not sure where else to ask … ?)
>> 
>> 	Thank you!
>> 
>> -Felipe Gasper
>> Ontario, Canada
>