A PAM module for authenticating using ssh-agent

The goal of this project is to provide a PAM authentication module determining the identity of user based on a signature request and response sent via the ssh-agent protocol to a potentially remote ssh-agent.

One scenario that this module can be used in is to grant escalated privileges on a remote system with the sudo command where the identity of the user is confirmed by their ability to provide a signature made with a local ssh-agent and a private key that never leaves the designated hardware. I use the Secretive app on macOS for this purpose.

This project is re-implementation of the pam_ssh_agent_auth module but does not share any code with that project. The eventual goal of this module is to be functionally equivalent and a drop-in replacement for pam_ssh_agent_auth.

This project is currently in a usable state, and has been tested with Ubuntu 22.04. As of now, the path expansion patterns that pam_ssh_agent_auth provides are not implemented. In other words a single authorized_keys file is expected to be used.

Project goals

Since this is security sensitive software and a bug could easily result in undue privilege escalation, the main goal of this project is to be robust and easy to follow for would-be reviewers.

The implementation leans heavily on crates available in the Rust ecosystem that implements the different parts needed for the overall functionality, most notably the pam, ssh-key, and ssh-agent-client-rs crates. Using upstream libraries directly is intended to make it easier to ensure that implementation issues with security implication gets addressed in a timely manner. A secondary benefit is that it is easier to support a wide range of algorithms.

Usage

use debuild -b to build a .deb package with the shared object and install it with dpkg
install doas, to ensure that you have a different way of elevating your privileges than sudo. You will need to add a permit line in /etc/doas.conf for it to work
Replace the common-auth include in /etc/pam.d/sudo with auth required pam_ssh_agent.so
Configure sudo to not drop the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable by adding Defaults env_keep += "SSH_AUTH_SOCK to the file /etc/sudoers.d/ssh_agent_env
Add the public key that your ssh-agent knows about to /etc/security/authorized_keys

Configuration options

PAM modules can be configured using space separated options after pam_ssh_agent.so in the applicable configuration file in /etc/pam.d. pam_ssh_agent currently understands the following options

debug This will increase log output to the AUTHPRIV syslog facility
file=/file/name This will modify the file holding the authorized public keys instead of the default /etc/security/authorized_keys.

License

Licensed under either of the Apache License, Version 2.0 or the MIT license at your option.

Contribution licensing