News

Abstract:

SSH certificates are used by administrators so connections to the server can be verified. This ensures that only authorized administrators can access the server and that the server being accessed is the intended machine. Current solutions for managing SSH certificates are focused on commercial use, which makes them cumbersome for small groups and individuals to use. These solutions require running multiple services which companies already use but add significant overhead for smaller groups. We developed a new standalone system that makes it easy to manage SSH certificates for small amounts of servers and users, without requiring additional servers to be deployed. We evaluated our system with a user study to demonstrate its ease of use. We hope that this implementation can help guide future research toward a more simplified certificate authentication system for SSH.