Useful utility?

I've been hearing a lot of complaints from sysadmins who I try to convince
to run SSH lately.

"Key management is too difficult."
"I cant keep track of all that stuff."

I think that an interesting answer might be a ssh key issuing "robot." or
vending machine of sorts.

It might works something like this.

User wants access to the sshd running host.
Sysadmin gives the user a one time key only good for connecting to the
vending machine via SSH.  Would be nice if the robot recycled the password
every time a successful connection was made.

Connecting to the vending machine, the user would fill out a form
including the hostnames he was likely to connect from and etc.

After filling out that form, the user would be issued a key for the
system, which would be automatically entered into authorized_keys.
Whatever other automation was needed to get a user up and running on SSH
would be executed.

Of course, the main problem is that the sysadmin could capture the secret
key of the user and use it to create a false login trail or other
mischief.  This could be avoided by allowing a user generated key to be
submitted, of course.  Ideally both options would be presented with a
"less secure" warning for the former.

Might make a nice project for someone fluent in perl, or even a webpage.

I'd do it my self if my programming talents were not so pathetic.

Comments?

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Black Unicorn <unicorn@schloss.li> writes:

>> I've been hearing a lot of complaints from sysadmins who I try to convince
>> to run SSH lately.
>> 
>> "Key management is too difficult."
>> "I cant keep track of all that stuff."
>> 
>> I think that an interesting answer might be a ssh key issuing "robot." or
>> vending machine of sorts.
>> 
>> It might works something like this.
>> 
>> [ details omitted ]
>> 
>> Comments?

It sounds like you've basically reinvented Kerberos, at least from a
key management perspective.  If you consider some of the pk extensions
to Kerberos which have been proposed recently, it's even vaguely
similar cryptographically.

SSH is great if you control everything in your environment, and if the
number of users and endpoints is small.  But as these parameters grow
and change, Kerberos is more useful, because it scales more easily.
What would be truly useful would be to combine the different
approaches, so that you could use whichever mode was most appropriate
to your environment.  This is possible, but the details are subtle,
and would probably make backward compatibility difficult.

		Marc