Subject: SSH extensions for Asserted Identities and WebSocket transport

From: Phil Lello <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 10:29:47 +0100

Hi Jeff et al.,

Many thanks for the encouragement. I've exchanged a few emails on other
IETF lists, and am currently working on test implementations as time
permits.

Before I dive into the proposed solution(s), I'll describe my motivation.
Essentially, I'd like to be able to extend existing application-servers
that use SecSH as a transport to support authentication by federated
identities such as SAML.

My initial point of attack was going to be adding a generic "asserted
identity" mechanism to the protocol to allow a client to present
time-limited signed assertions that the server would accept or reject
according to local policy.

I have now shifted focus slightly, and am looking to add support for SASL
mechanisms to SSH, and leverage efforts already made at integrating SAML
and OpenID with non-web transports. Since the SAML and OpenID RFCs still
involve a web loop, it probably makes sense to add an "asserted identity"
SASL mechanism too.

A related extension is a standard WebSocket binding for SecSH; this is
specifically intended for applications that support the SSH protocol and
also expose a web interface. I'm specifically thinking of Gerrit here, but
I'd be surprised if there aren't others. Making the HTTP portion of an
application server widely accessible is generally simpler in a corporate
environment than opening up access to other port numbers, so this would
enable wider deployment of SSH-as-a-transport.

Phil

On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 10:20 PM, Jeffrey Hutzelman <[email-masked]> wrote:

> On Tue, 2015-08-11 at 07:27 +0100, Phil Lello wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Is this list still in use? I am working on an extension to SSH
> > authentication, and would like to create an RFC to standardise the
> > mechanism.
>
>
> As Tom points out, this list doesn't get much traffic these days.
> However, it's probably still the best place to reach SSH implementors
> and other protocol experts.  So by all means, if you have an extension
> to propose, tell us about it.
>
> -- Jeff
>
>