4 ms·

SSH over QUIC would be nice. I don't see any advantage of layering HTTP/3 here. It adds more friction, and the only advantage it brings is being able to "hide"

• mkesper 3y ago
  Ssh hostkeys offer no solution for first connect to ephemeral hosts.
  • jeroenhd 3y ago
    If hosts are configured with SSH certificates as part or their setup, you can definitely skip TOFU and determine trust on the first connection. That won't work for the "I need to connect to a random IP address" scenario, but any cloud server exposing SSH can be configured with a certificate signed by a company/personal SSH certificate authority. You could configure something delightfully atrocious like https://github.com/mjg59/ssh_pki https://github.com/mjg59/ssh_pki but I think for most use cases where you connect to loads of SSH servers, host keys and certificate authorities will work just fine. We can do with an ACME-like protocol for distributing these certificates, though.
    • mcfedr 3y ago
      Given how rare this is, using https seems like a great idea
  • Ayesh 3y ago
    Strict SSHFP can theoretically solve it [1], assuming it's used in the first place and has DNSSEC. I personally use it for all servers I manage purely because I like the additional security, but it not at all common and DNSSEC isn't all that perfect either. [1] https://aye.sh/blog/sshfp-verification https://aye.sh/blog/sshfp-verification
    • overstay8930 3y ago
      It's crazy that SSHFP hasn't taken off, I don't think a single person on earth has ever verified a host key before attempting to connect, and deploying DNSSEC is trivial now that you can use ECC and ED25519.
      • tptacek 3y ago
        * Deploying DNSSEC is obviously not trivial, as doing so has taken some of the largest companies on the Internet fully off the Internet for multiple hours, within the last year, so much so that it has become a running joke when companies have prolonged outages to suggest that DNSSEC is the culprit. * There are still resolvers that can't handle Ed25519 * Being able to use Ed25519 was never the ops problem with getting DNSSEC rolled out! * It's weird to assume that people would want to enroll their server integrity --- something that doesn't in any way depend on an Internet PKI designed to allow strangers to verify your identity, and that enlists de facto government support to make that use case work --- in a global PKI, especially when SSH already has a perfectly good certificate system that solves the same problem without any of the above liabilities. What boggles my mind, and I mean this sincerely, not as snark, is that anybody in the entire world takes SSHFP seriously. Even if you stipulate that DNSSEC (and/or DANE) works, just arguendo, it's still a totally different use case than resolving SSH key continuity problems.
        • xp84 3y ago
          My favorite thing about normal ssh keys is the way it does not come with the obnoxious assumption that if I don’t rent my cert from some rent-seeker, it is super scary and invalid. And yet it gives me both identity verification and encryption. I get the reasons we got there for HTTPS due to how unsophisticated the least experienced users are, but I am glad this idea here won’t catch on in real life, because we don’t need any of this stuff for SSH — mainly because it already has these features.
          • tptacek 3y ago
            TLS certificates are free. Unsigned certificates are super scary and invalid. SSH and TLS do not work with the same threat model; first-contacts with SSH servers are comparatively rare (if they aren't, you should be worried about your SSH threat model, too).
  • cortesoft 3y ago
    You can set up your ephemeral hosts to come up with properly signed host keys.
  • ikiris 3y ago
    SSh hosts have supported certs for at least a decade.
• acdha 3y ago
  They list other advantages in the README such as tying into the web authentication model, which is pretty big for enterprise use as everything moves towards OIDC. If they could eventually use passkeys that’d be really nice.
  • kdklol 3y ago
    SSH supports passkeys: https://developers.yubico.com/SSH/#_fido2 https://developers.yubico.com/SSH/#_fido2
    • acdha 3y ago
      With hardware tokens, yes, I use that. I was thinking that building it on a web server would be really handy with an integrated client you could use with iCloud, Windows Hello, etc.
      • ikiris 3y ago
        This already exists too
      • kdklol 3y ago
        With /passkeys/, actually! It's more generic than just hardware keys. I don't know of any good implementation yet, but there were a few projects on github mentioned in some passkey-related discussions here. I do not use anything like iCloud or Windows Hello and I don't know what these services actually use, but if they implement these open standards, it's only a matter of adding some glue code. I'd say it's likely that Putty will implement this over on Windows eventually. That is my speculation, as I said, I don't actually use any of this.
        • acdha 3y ago
          I mentioned those because key management is the hard part and most people are going to be using platform authenticators for that reason. In some cases there are APIs (this was one of the features in the last macOS / iOS release) but I was also thinking that moving it closer to a browser is interesting because between platform passkeys and SSO, there are a lot of people who have all of their credentials & MFA ready in a browser and would like to reuse that. Some searching suggests there’s at least one implementation of the SSH agent protocol using Windows Hello, which is great.
• InvaderFizz 3y ago
  It sure would be nice to be able to easily throw up a CDN like Cloudflare in front of my ssh server with no client side special sauce required. I didn't see it stated in the documentation, it this feels like something that might work for that setup.
  • ryandvm 3y ago
    Why are people obsessed with implanting CloudFlare right in the middle of everything they do? There is absolutely nobody that needs DDoS for their SSH server. I get that CloudFlare has been a well behaved netizen so far, but let's be real, it won't last forever. It never does. Eventually the shareholders start turning the screws and CloudFlare is going to succumb to the same pressures every company does and they're going to start extracting advertising value from their "customers". How about we save the CDNs for the serious stuff and just run our SSH servers and low traffic HTTP sites ourselves?
    • InvaderFizz 3y ago
      Absolutely nothing to do with DDoS in my case. I want censorship regimes to have to break large portions of the internet for their citizens to stop even the most simple leak vector. Let them block Cloudflare, Akamai, and Cloudfront.
    • JCharante 3y ago
      Every personal blog is low traffic until it lands at the top of HN
      • chrisandchris 3y ago
        Which still means that the HTTP-server can be behind CloudFlare, but nobody accesses your blog through SSH (hence not necessary to put it behind CloudFlare).
      • account42 3y ago
        You don't need buttflare to handle HN levels of traffic. And even if your wordpress or other shitty blog software falls over for a couple of hours? So what, it's a personal website.
• bitwize 3y ago
  In the 90s it was commonplace to design a new protocol on top of TCP/IP. These days, all the tooling and infrastructure is for HTTP. Designing a new protocol, you'd be starting from scratch; HTTP is much, much easier to build an application on top of.
  • unilynx 3y ago
    I doubt QUIC is easier than TCP to build on. But it's much easier to get your new protocol through firewalls and other middleware when using port 443 than trying to introduce a new port (or worse: a new protocol number)
    • tengwar2 3y ago
      Which sounds like more of a disadvantage if you are running a firewall.
      • anticensor 3y ago
        If your firewall drops unknown protocols, then it is broken. Internet is designed to be default-open, not default-closed.