lsh
lshd
This document describes lsh
and related programs. The
lsh
suite of programs is intended as a free replacement for
the ssh
suite of programs. In turn, ssh
was intended
as a secure replacement for the rsh
and rlogin
programs for remote login over the Internet.
lsh
is a component of the GNU system.
This manual explains how to use and hack lsh
; it corresponds to
lsh
version 1.4.
--- The Detailed Node Listing ---
Introduction
Related programs and techniques
Getting started
Invoking lsh
What is this thing called computer security anyway? Why would you want
to use a program like lsh
?
This chapter explains the threats lsh
tries to protect you from,
and some of the threats that remain. It also describes some of the
technologies used in lsh
.
From time to time in this manual, I will speak about the enemy. This means anybody who is trying to eavesdrop or disturb your private communication. This usage is technical, and it does not imply that the enemy is somehow morally inferior to you: The enemy may be some awful criminals trying to eavesdrop on you, or it may be the police trying to eavesdrop on the same criminals.
The enemy can be a criminal, or a competitor, or your boss who's trying to find out how much you tell collegues at competing firms. It may be your own or somebody else's national security officials. Or your ex-boyfriend who happens to be too curious.
So what can the enemy do to your communications and your privacy? Remember that just because you're paranoid that doesn't mean that nobody is trying to get you...
When logging in to some other machine via the Internet, either in the same building or a few continents away, there are several things that may be under enemy attack.
And even without routing anomalies, it is possible that the enemy has
been able to take control of some nearby machine, and can listen in from
there. Of course, passive eavesdropping is most dangerous if you
transmit cleartext passwords. This is the main reason not to use vanilla
telnet to login to remote systems. Use a telnet with support for
SSL or Kerberos, or use a program like lsh
or
ssh
.
A passive eavesdropper is assumed not to do anything nasty with your
packets beyond listening to them.
lsh
makes no attempt to protect you from local attacks. You have
to trust the endpoint machines. It seems really difficult to uphold any
security if the local machine is compromised. This is important to keep
in mind in the "visitor"-scenario, where you visit a friend or perhaps an
Internet café and want to connect to some of the machines at home or at
work. If the enemy has been able to compromize your friend's or the
café's equipment, you may well be in trouble.
Protection from denial-of-service attacks is also a very difficult
problem, and lsh
makes no attempt to protect you from that.
Instead, the aim of lsh
, and most serious tools for cryptographic
protection of communications across the net, is to isolate the
vulnerabilities to the communication endpoints. If you know that the
endpoints are safe, the enemy should not be able to compromize your
privacy or communications. Except for denial-of-service attacks (which
at least can't be performed without you noticing it).
First of all, lsh
provides protection against passive
eavesdropping. In addition, if you take the appropriate steps to make
sure that hostkeys are properly authenticated, lsh
also protects
against man-in-the-middle attacks and in particular against attacks on
the name resolution. In short, you need only trust the security at the
end points: Even if the enemy controls all other network equipment, name
resolution and routing infrastructure, etc, he can't do anything beyond
the denial-of-service attack.
And at last, remember that there is no such thing as absolute security. You have to estimate the value of that which you are protecting, and adjust the security measures so that your enemies will not find it worth the effort to break them.
lsh
does not only provide more secure replacements for
telnet
, rsh
and rlogin
, it also provides
some other features to make it convenient to communicate securely. This
section is expected to grow with time, as more features from the
wish-list are added to lsh. One goal for lsh
is to make it
reasonable easy to extend it, without messing with the core security
functionality.
lsh
can be configured to allow login based on a personal key-pair
consisting of a private and a public key, so that you can execute remote
commands without typing your password every time. You can also use
Thomas Wu's Secure Remote Password Protocol (SRP). Kerberos support is
on the wish list but not yet supported (see Kerberos).
The public-key authentication methods should also be extended to support Simple Public Key Infrastructure (SPKI) certificates, including some mechanism to delegate restricted logins.
Forwarding of arbitrary TCP/IP connections is provided. This
is useful for tunneling otherwise insecure protocols, like telnet and
pop, through an encrypted lsh
connection.
Convenient tunneling of X was one of the most impressive
features of the original ssh
programs. The current version of
lsh
implements X-forwarding, although the
lshd
server doesn't provide that service yet.
Whan X forwarding is in effect, the remote process is started
in an environment where the DISPLAY
variable in the environment
points to a fake X server, connection to which are forwarded
to the X server in your local environment. lsh
also
creates a new "fake" MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1
for controlling access
control. Your real X authentication data is never sent to the
remote machine.
Other kinds of tunneling that may turn out to be useful include
authentication (i.e. ssh-agent
), general forwarding of
UDP, and why not also general IP-tunneling.
This sections describes some other programs and techniques related to
lsh
. The ssh family of programs use mostly the same kind of
security as lsh
. Kerberos and IPSEC operate quite
differently, in particular when it comes to protection against
man-in-the-middle attacks.
ssh-1.x
The first of the Secure shell programs was Tatu Ylönen's ssh
.
The latest of the version 1 series is ssh-1.33
which speaks
version 1.5 of the protocol. The "free" version of ssh-1.33
does not allow commercial use without additional licensing, which makes
ssh-1.33
non-free software according to Debian's Free Software
Guidelines and the Open Source Definition.
The version 1 protocol has some minor weaknesses, in particular, all support for using stream ciphers was disabled by default a few versions back, for security reasons.
There also exists free implementations of ssh-1
, for both Unix
and Windows. ossh
and later OpenSSH are derived from earlier
version av Tatu Ylönen's ssh
, and are free software.
ssh-2.x
ssh2
implements the next generation of the Secure Shell
protocol, the development of which is supervised by the IETF
secsh Working Group. lsh
implements the required subset of
this protocol. It is intended to be compatible with the ssh2
series of programs distributed by F-Secure Corporation.
However, the existing versions of ssh2
gets some details of the
protocol wrong (probably because it predates the protocol
specification), so there is some amount of bug-compatibility required.
Interoperability between independently developed implementations is one
necessary condition for the ssh-2
protocol to become a Proposed
Standard.
The license for F-Secure's ssh2
programs is similar to that
for recent versions of ssh1
, but with a narrower definition of
"non-commercial use".
Besides lsh
there are few free implementations of the
ssh-2
protocols. Since May 2000 it is supported also by
OpenSSH.
Kerberos is a key distribution system originally developed in the late 1980:s as a part of Project Athena at MIT. Recent development have been done at The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm (KTH).
Kerberos uses a central trusted ticket-granting server, and requires less trust on the local machines in the system. It does not use public-key technology.
Usually, Kerberos support is compiled into applications such as telnet, ftp and X-clients. The ssh family of programs, on the other hand, tries to do all needed magic, for instance to forward X securely, and then provides general TCP/IP forwarding as a kitchen sink.
I believe Kerberos' and lsh's protection against passive eavesdropping are mostly equivalent. The difference is in the set of machines and assumptions you have to trust in order to be safe from a man-in-the-middle attack.
I think the main advantage of lsh
over Kerberos is that it is
easier to install and use for on ordinary mortal user. In order to set
up key exchange between two different Kerberos systems (or Kerberos
realms), the respective system operators need to exchange keys. In the
case of two random users at two random sites, setting up lsh
or
some other program in the ssh family is likely easier than to get the
operators to spend time and attention. So lsh
should be easier to
use in an anarchistic grass-roots environment.
Another perspective is to combine ssh features like X and TCP/IP forwarding with authentication based on Kerberos. Such an arrangement may provide the best of two worlds for those who happen to have an account at a suitable ticket-granting server.
IPSEC is a set of protocols for protecting general IP traffic. It is developed by another IETF working group, and is also a required part of IP version 6.
Again, the main difference between IPSEC and Kerberos and ssh is the set of machines that have to be secure and the keys that have to be exchanged in order to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks.
Current protocols and implementations of IPSEC only provide authentication of machines; there's nothing analogous to the user authentication in ssh or Kerberos.
On the other hand, IPSEC provides one distinct advantage over application level encryption. Because IP and TCP headers are authenticated, it provides protection against some denial-of-service attacks. In particular, it makes attacks that cause hangup of a TCP connection considerably more difficult.
So it makes sense to use both IPSEC and some application level cryptographic protocol.
Also note that it is possible to use the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) to tunnel arbitrary IP traffic accross an ssh connection. This arrangement provides some of the functionality of IPSEC, and is sometimes referred to as "a poor man's Virtual Private Network".
You install lsh
with the usual ./configure && make &&
make install
. For a full listing of the options you can give to
configure
, use ./configure --help
. For example, use
--without-pty
to disable pty-support.
The most commonly used option is --prefix
, which tells
configure where lsh should be installed. Default prefix is
/usr/local
. The lshd
server is installed in
$prefix/sbin
, all other programs and scripts are installed in
$prefix/bin
.
The configure script tries to figure out if the linker needs any special flags specifying where to find dynamically linked libraries at run time (one case where this matters is if you have a dynamic libz.so installed in a non-standard place). Usually, you can use
./configure --with-lib-path=/opt/lib:/other/place
to specify extra library directories, and the configure script should do
the right thing. If it doesn't work, or you believe that you know your
system better than ./configure
, just set LDFLAGS and/or
LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the right values instead.
This section tells you how to perform some common tasks using the
lsh
suite of programs, without covering all options and
possibilities.
Several of the lsh programs requires a good pseudorandomness generator
for secure operation. The first thing you need to do is to create a
seed file for the generator. To create a personal seed file, stored as
~/.lsh/yarrow-seed-file
, run
lsh-make-seed
To create a seed file for use by lshd
, run
lsh-make-seed --server
as root. The seed file is stored as
/var/spool/lsh/yarrow-seed-file
.
lsh
basicslsh
is the program you use for connection to a remote machine. A
few examples are:
lsh sara.lysator.liu.se
Connects to sara.lysator.liu.se
and starts an interactive shell.
In this example, and in the rest of the examples in this section, lsh
will ask for your password, unless you have public-key user
authentication set up.
The first time you try to connect between two machines, lsh
typically complains about an "unknown host key". This is because it
has no reason to believe that it was the right machine that answered,
and not a machine controlled by the enemy (see Threats). The default
behaviour is to never ever accept a server that is not properly
authenticated. A machine is considered authentic if it follows the
protocol and has its public hostkey listed in ~/.lsh/known_hosts
.
To make lsh less paranoid, use
lsh --sloppy-host-authentication sara.lysator.liu.se
Then lsh
will display a fingerprint of the host key of the
remote machine, and ask you if it is correct. If so, the machine is
considered authentic and its key is appended to the file
~/.lsh/captured_keys
. You can copy keys you have verified to
~/.lsh/known_hosts
.
You can even use
lsh --sloppy-host-authentication --capture-to ~/.lsh/known_hosts
to get lsh
to behave more like the traditional ssh
program.
You can create fingerprints for the hostkeys you need regularly, and keep with you (see sexp).
lsh -l omar sara.lysator.liu.se
Connects, like above, but tries to log in as the user "omar".
lsh sara.lysator.liu.se tar cf - some/dir | (cd /target/dir && tar -xf -)
Copies a directory from the remote machine, by executing one remote and
one local tar
process and piping them together.
CVS_RSH=lsh cvs -d cvs.lysator.liu.se:/cvsroot/lsh co lsh
Checks out the lsh
source code from the CVS
repository.
One useful feature of lsh
and other ssh-like programs is the
ability to forward arbitrary connections inside the encrypted
connection. There are two flavors: "local" and "remote" forwarding.
An example of local forwarding is
lsh -L 4000:kom.lysator.liu.se:4894 sara.lysator.liu.se
This makes lsh
listen on port 4000 on the local machine. When
someone connects, lsh
asks the server to open a connection from
the remote machine (i.e. sara
) to port 4894 on another machine
(i.e. kom
). The two connections are piped together using an
encrypted channel.
There are a few things that should be noted here:
lsh
only listens on the loopback interface, so only
clients on the same machine can use the tunnel. To listen on all
interfaces, use the -g
flag.
lsh
listens on.
sara
in this example.
sara
to kom
.
Only the middle part is protected by lsh
: all data flowing
through the tunnel is sent across the first and last part in the
clear. So forwarding doesn't offer much protection unless the tunnel
endpoint and the ultimate target machine are close to eachother. They
should usually be either the same machine, or two machines connected by
a local network that is trusted.
lsh
helps you get out through
the firewall in a secure way.
lsh
is
doing. In the example above, a tunnel is set up, but lsh
will
also start an interactive shell for you. Just as if the -L
option was not present. If this is not what you want, the -N
or
-B
option is for you (see Invoking lsh)
Remote forwarding is similar, but asks the remote machine to listen on a port. An example of remote forwarding is
lsh -g -R 8080:localhost:80 sara.lysator.liu.se
This asks the remote machine to listen on port 8080 (note that you are
probably not authorized to listen on port 80). Whenever someone
connects, the connection is tunnelled to your local machine, and
directed to port 80 on the same machine. Note the use of -g
;
the effect is to allow anybody in the world to use the tunnel to connect
to your local webserver.
The same considerations that apply to forwarded local ports apply also to forwarded remote ports.
At last, you can use any number of -L
and -R
options
on the same command line.
lshd
basicsThere are no global configuration files for lshd
; all
configuration is done with command line options (see Invoking lshd).
To run lshd
, you must first create a hostkey, usually stored in
/etc/lsh_host_key
. To do this, run
lsh-keygen --server | lsh-writekey --server
This will also create a file /etc/lsh_host_key.pub
,
containing the corresponding public key.
A typical command line for starting lshd in daemon mode is simply
lshd --daemonic
You can find init script for lshd
tailored for Debian's and
RedHat's GNU/Linux systems in the contrib
directory.
It is also possible to let init
start lshd
, by adding it in
/etc/inittab
.
Public-key user authentication is a way to authenticate for login, without having to type any passwords. There are two steps: Creating a key pair, and authorizing the public key to the systems where you want to log in.
To create a keypair, run
lsh-keygen | lsh-writekey
This can take some time, but in the end it creates two files
~/.lsh/identity
and ~/.lsh/identity.pub
.
If you want to use the key to login to some other machine, say
sara
, you can do that by first copying the key,
lsh sara.lysator.liu.se '>my-key.pub' <~/.lsh/identity.pub
then authorizing it by executing, on sara
,
lsh-authorize my-key.pub
For security reasons, you should keep the private key
~/.lsh/identity
secret. Anybody who can read that file will be
able to login in your name to any machine where the corresponding public
key is registered as an authorized key.
Naturally, you should also make sure not to authorize any keys but your
own. For instance, it is inappropriate to use an insecure mechanism such
as unauthenticated email, ftp
or http
to transfer your
public key to the machines where you want to authorize it.
If you have accounts on several systems, you usually create a single keypair on each of the systems, and on each system you authorize some or all of your other public keys for login.
Note that lsh-writekey
does not currently encrypt your
private key in any way. That means that you can lose it if a backup tape
gets into the wrong hands, and if you use NFS it will likely be sent in
the clear across your local network. To encrypt the key using a pass
phrase, give the -c 3des
option to lsh-writekey
.
The Secure Remote Password protocol is a fairly new protocol that provides mutual authentication based on a password. To use it, you must first choose a secret password. Next, you create a password verifier that is derived from the password. The verifier is stored on the target machine (i.e. the machine you want to log in to).
To create a verifier, you run the srp-gen
program and type
your new password. You have to do it on either the target machine,
redirecting the output to ~/.lsh/srp-verifier, or you can generate it on
some other machine and copy it to the target.
The main advantage of using SRP is that you use the password not only to get access to the remote machine, but you also use it to authenticate the remote machine. I.e. you can use it to connect securely, without having to know any hostkeys or fingerprints beforehand!
For instance, you could connect using SRP to fetch the hostkey fingerprint for the remote machine, as a kind of bootstrapping procedure, and then use traditional authentication methods for further connections.
For this to work, the verifier must be kept secret. If the enemy gets your verifier, he can mount some attacks:
If you use SRP to get the hostkey or fingerprint for the remote machine, as outlined above, the impersonation attack destroys security, you could just as well connect the hostkey presented by the remote server without verifying it at all.
If you use SRP exclusively, the situation seems somewhat different. As far as I can see, an attacker knowing your verifier can not mount a traditional man-in-the-middle-attack: He can play the server's part when talking to you, but in order to play your part when talking to the real server, he needs to know your password as well.
SRP support is disabled by default, but can be enabled by the
--srp-keyexchange
option to lshd
and lsh
(naturally, it won't be used unless enabled on both sides). At the time
of this writing, SRP is too new to be trusted by conservative
cryptographers (and remember that conservatism is a virtue when it comes
to security).
And even if SRP in itself is secure, the way lsh
integrates it into the ssh
protocol has not had much peer review.
The bottom line of this disclaimer is that the SRP support in
lsh
should be considered experimental.
As far as I know, using SRP as a host authentication mechanism
is not supported by any other ssh
implementation. The protocol
lsh
uses is described in the doc/srp-spec.txt
.
Implementations that use SRP only as a user authentication
mechanism are not compatible with lsh
.
Keys and most other objects lsh
needs to store on disk are
represented as so called S-expressions or sexps for short.
S-expressions have their roots in the Lisp world, and a variant of them
in used in the Simple Public Key Infrastructure (SPKI).
Currently, lsh
's support for SPKI is quite limited,
but it uses SPKI's formats for keys and Access Control Lists
(ACL:s).
There are several flavours of the sexp syntax:
To see what your ~/.lsh/known_hosts
file really contains, try
sexp-conv -i advanced < ~/.lsh/known_hosts
The sexp-conv
program can also be used to computes
fingerprints. The fingerprint of a key (or any sexp, for that matter) is
simply the hash of its canonical representation. For example,
sexp-conv --raw-hash </etc/lsh_host_key.pub
ssh2
and OpenSSHIf you are already using ssh2
or OpenSSH, and have creating
one or more personal keypairs, you need to convert the public keys to
lsh
's format before you can authorize them. Use the supplied
ssh-conv
script,
ssh-conv <openssh-key.pub >new-key.pub
You can then use the usual lsh-authorize
on the converted
keys. ssh-conv
supports both DSA and RSA
keys.
Conversion of keys the other way is also possible, by using the
lsh-export-key
program. It reads a public key in
lsh
's SPKI format on stdin, and writes the key in
ssh2
/OpenSSH format on stdout.
There are currently no tools for converting private keys.
lsh
You use lsh
to login to a remote machine. Basic usage is
lsh [-p port number] sara.lysator.liu.se
which attempts to connect, login, and start an interactive shell on the
remote machine. Default port number is whatever your system's
/etc/services
lists for ssh
. Usually, that is port 22.
There is a plethora of options to lsh
, to let you configure where
and how to connect, how to authenticate, and what you want to do once
properly logged in to the remote host. Many options have both long and
short forms. This manual does not list all variants; for a full listing
of supported options, use lsh --help
.
Note that for many of the options to lsh
, the ordering of the
options on the command line is important.
Before a packet is sent, each packet can be compressed, encrypted and authenticated, in that order. When the packet is received, it is first decrypted, next it is checked that it is authenticated properly, and finally it is decompressed. The algorithms used for this are negotiated with the peer at the other end of the connection, as a part of the initial handshake and key exchange.
Each party provides a list of supported algorithms, and the first algorithm listed by the client, which is also found on the server's list, is selected. Note that this implies that order in which algorithms are listed on the server's list doesn't matter: if several algorithms are present on both the server's and the client's lists, it's the client's order that determines which algorithm is selected.
Algorithms of different types, e.g. data compression and message authentication, are negotiated independently. Furthermore, algorithms used for transmission from the client to the server are independent of the algorithms used for transmission from the server to the client. There are therefore no less than six different lists that could be configured at each end.
The command line options for lsh and lshd don't let you specify arbitrary lists. For instance, you can't specify different preferences for sending and receiving.
There is a set of default algorithm preferences. When you use a command
line option to say that you want to use algorithm for one of the
algorithms, the default list is replaced with a list containing the
single element algorithm. For example, if you use -c
arcfour
to say that you want to use arcfour
as the encryption
algorithm, the connection will either end up using arcfour
, or
algorithm negotiation will fail because the peer doesn't support
arcfour
.
Option | Algorithm type | Default |
|
-z | Data compression | none , zlib
| The default preference list supports zlib compression, but
prefers not to use it.
|
-c | Encryption | aes256-cbs , 3dec-cbc , blowfish-cbc , arcfour
| The default encryption algorithm is aes256. The default list
includes only quite old and well studied algorithms. There is a special
algorithm name all to enable all supported encryption algorithms
(except none ).
|
-m | Message Authentication | hmac-sha1 , hmac-md5
| Both supported message authentication algorithms are of the
HMAC family.
|
As a special case, -z
with no argument changes the compression
algorithm list to zlib
, none
, which means that you want to
use zlib
if the other end supports it. This is different from
-zzlib
which causes the negotiation to fail if the other end
doesn't support zlib
. A somewhat unobvious consequence of
-z
having an optional argument is that if you provide an
argument, it must follow directly after the option letter, no spaces
allowed.
As described earlier (see Threats), proper authentication of the
remote host is crucial to protect the connection against
man-in-the-middle attacks. By default, lsh
verifies the server's
claimed host key against the Access Control Lists in
~/.lsh/known_hosts
. If the remote host cannot be authenticated,
the connection is dropped.
The options that change this behaviour are
--host-db
--sloppy-host-authentication
lsh
not to drop the connection if the server's key can not
be authenticated. Instead, it displays the fingerprint of the key, and
asks if it is trusted. The received key is also appended to the file
~/.lsh/captured_keys
. If run in quiet mode, lsh -q
--sloppy-host-authentication
, lsh
connects to any host, no
questions asked.
--strict-host-authentication
--capture-to
~/.lsh/captured_keys
. For example,
lsh --sloppy-host-authentication --capture-to ~/.lsh/known_hosts
makes lsh
behave more like the ssh
program.
--srp-keyexchange
-l
LOGNAME
environment variable is used.
-i
lsh
uses
~/.lsh/identity
, if it exists. It ought to be possible to use
several -i
options to use more than one file, but that is
currently not implemented.
--no-publickey
There are many things lsh
can do once you are logged in. There
are two types of options that control this: actions and
action modifiers. For short options, actions use uppercase letters
and modifiers use lowercase.
For each modifier --foo
there's also a negated form
--no-foo
. Options can also be negated by preceding it with the
special option -n
. This is mainly useful for negating short
options. For instance, use -nt
to tell lsh
not to
request a remote pseudo terminal. Each modifier and its negation can be
used several times on the command line. For each action, the latest
previous modifier of each pair apply.
First, the actions:
-L
lsh
to listen on listen-port on the local machine. When
someone conects to that port, lsh
asks the remote server to open
a connection to target-port on target-host, and if it
succeeds, the two connections are joined together through an the
lsh
connection. Both port numbers should be given in decimal.
-R
-L
. But in this case lsh
asks the
remote server to listen on listen-port. When someone
connects to the remote hosts, the server will inform the local
lsh
. The local lsh
then connects to target-port on
target-host.
-E
-S
-G
-N
-B
-N
If there are trailing arguments after the name of the remote system,
this is equivalent to a -E
option, with a command string
constructed by catenating all the remaining arguments, separated by
spaces. This implies that the arguments are usually expanded first by
the local shell, and then the resulting command string is interpreted
again by the remote system.
If there are no trailing arguments after the name of the remote system,
and the -N
option is not given, the default action is to start
a shell on the remote machine. I.e. this is equivalent to the
-S
option.
There are a few supported modifiers:
-t
lsh
asks the remote system to allocate
a pseudo terminal. If it succeeds, the local terminal is set to raw
mode. The default behaviour is to request a pty if and only if the
local lsh
process has a controlling terminal. This modifier
applies to actions that create remote processes, i.e. -E
and
-S
, as well as the default actions.
Currently, this option is ignored if there is no local terminal.
-x
S
and the default actions.
--stdin
lsh
's stdin for the first process, and
/dev/null
for the rest. This option applies to the -E
and -S
options as well as to the default actions. The option
applies to only one process; as soon as it is used it is reset to the
default.
--stdout
lsh
's stdout. Like --stdin
, it is reset
after it is used.
--stderr
--stdout
option.
-g
-L
and -R
. By default, only
connections to the loopback interface, ip 127.0.0.1, are forwared. This
implies that only processes on the same machine can use the forwarded
tunnel directly. If the -g modifier is in effect, the forwarding party
will listen on all network interfaces.
These options determines what messages lsh
writes on
its stderr.
-q
-v
lsh
a little more verbose. The intention is
to provide information that is useful for ordinary trouble shooting,
and makes sense also to those not familiar with lsh
internals.
--trace
lsh
's flow of control.
--debug.
SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_REQUEST
messages, but you should still use it with care.
--log-file
Note that all these options are orthogonal. If you use --trace
,
you usually want to add -v
as well; --trace
does not
do that automatically.
lshd
lshd
is a server that accepts connections from clients
speaking the Secure Shell Protocol. It is usually started automatically
when the systems boots, and runs with root privileges. However, it is
also possible to start lshd
manually, and with user
privileges.
There are currently no configuration files. Instead, command line options
are used to tell lshd
what to do. Many options have --foo
and --no-foo
variants. Options specifying the default behaviour
are not listed here.
Some of the options are the shared with lsh
. In particular, see
Algorithm options and Verbosity options.
Options specific to the lshd
server are:
-p
--interface
lshd
listens on all
interfaces.
-h
/etc/lsh_host_key
.
-i
--ssh1-fallback
ssh1
. lshd
doesn't
implement version 1 of the Secure Shell Protocol. But it can fork an
ssh1
server when an old client connects. Falling back to
ssh1
is inefficient, and requires some special features of the
server fallen back to. It should work with the sshd
daemon
supplied with reasonably new versions of F-Secure's sshd1
,
and with OpenSSH.
The optional argument provides the filename of the ssh1 daemon to use.
The default name is /usr/local/sbin/sshd1
, unless something else
was configured at compile time.
--daemonic
lshd
forks into the background,
redirects its stdio file descriptors to /dev/null
, changes its
working directory to /
, and redirects any diagnostic or debugging
messages via syslog.
lshd
should be able to deal with the environment it inherits
if it is started by init
or inetd
, but this is not
really tested.
--pid-file
lshd
. The mandatory argument provides the filename.
This option is enabled by default when operating in daemonic mode, and
the default filename is /var/run/lshd.pid
.
--enable-core
lshd
disables core dumps, to avoid leaking sensitive
information. This option changes that behaviour, and allows lshd
to dump core on fatal errors.
--no-password
--no-publickey
--root-login
lshd
.
--kerberos-passwords
lsh-krb-checkpw
helper program. Note that this does
not use the Kerberos infrastructure in the Right Way. Experimental.
--password-helper
lshd
to use a helper program for verifying passwords.
This is a generalization of --kerberos-passwords
, and it could
be used for verifying passwords against any password database. See the
source files lsh-krb-checkpw.c
and unix_user.c
for
details.
--login-shell
--srp-keyexchange
--no-pty-support
--no-tcp-forward
This chapters describes all files and all environment variables that
are used by lsh
, lshd
, and related programs.
There are a few environment variables that modifies the behaviour of
the lsh
programs. And there are also a handful of variables
that are setup by lshd
when starting user processes.
DISPLAY
DISPLAY
specifies the
local display. Used by lsh
.
HOME
~/.lsh
directory. When lshd
starts a user program, it
sets HOME
from the value in the /etc/passwd
file, except
if lshd
is running as an ordinary user process. In the
latter case, the new process inherits lsh
's own value of
HOME
.
LOGNAME
lshd
when starting new processes.
LSH_YARROW_SEED_FILE
lshd
and the client programs.
SHELL
lshd
starts a user process, it sets
SHELL
to the value in /etc/passwd
, unless overridden by
the --login-shell
command line option.
TERM
TERM
is transferred from client to
server.
TMPDIR
lshg
is located in
the filesystem.
TZ
lshd
inherit the value of
this variable from the server.
Files used by the lsh client, stored in the ~/lsh
directory:
captured_keys
lsh
--sloppy-host-authentication
. Or more precicely, each key is stored
together with an as SPKI (Simple Public Key Intrastructure) ACL:s
(Access Control Lists).
identity
lsh-keygen |
lsh-writekey
. Read by lsh
. Should be kept secret.
identity.pub
known_hosts
captured_keys
.
yarrow-seed-file
Files used by lshd
, some of which are read from user home
directories:
/etc/lsh_host_key
/etc/lsh_host_key.pub
/var/spool/lsh/yarrow-seed-file
lshd
's randomness generator.
~/.lsh/authorized_keys
lsh-authorize
.
~/.lsh/srp-verifier