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Description of problem: Many of our military and government customers are having to implement CAC card authentication. Most are needing to use these cards for ssh, without the use of rsa keys. Currently, we do not offer that functionality. We're specifically looking to provide X.509/PKCS11 authentication mechanism. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual results: Expected results: Additional info:
Hi Amy, if I understand the requirements right, this feature request is the same as bug #915398, which was rejected 3 years ago. Can you clarify that it is what you want? The patch [1] never made it into the openssh upstream. It is still maintained by the author and rebased against the recent versions, but it is 31k lines long patch (openssh-6.7 version; current version have monstrous 84k lines)! It is much more than all of the patches we have in RHEL7.3 openssh together so far and it would cause a lot maintenance costs, but also significant efforts on the side of QE to make sure it works and is secure enough. [1] http://roumenpetrov.info/openssh/
From discussing with David Sirrine, the government is requiring implementation of CAC cards for all environments. There have been some discussions as to whether they mean that ssh has to use the smart card for validation instead of ssh keys. Some have insisted that ssh keys cannot be used. David suggested that I open a case against openssh for this use case.
It is completely ok to have this discussion again. CAC cards are supported in RHEL and in combination some with identity management on the server side (AuthorizedKyesCommand), you can take care of the certificates outside of the ssh quite easily and leave inside of ssh only the minimal authentication part (RSA keys for now), which is supported natively. I believe we have guides for setting up smartcards authentication in SSH, but if there is something unclear, please let me know.