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The main purpose of this cookbook is to make openssh more secure.

One of the first things to do on a production server is to:

  • disable root logins
  • disable password logins
  • disable challenge response authentication
  • disable dns lookups

All these are cookbook's defaults, fully configurable via attributes. Before changing any of those defauls, make sure that you fully understand the implication.

To further increase the security, you can define specific groups (via :allowed_groups) and users (via :allowed_users) which are allowed to login via SSH. Everyone outside those groups or users (or both) won't be able to login.

I personally prefer the groups approach as it's more flexible. These are the more common groups which you might want to define in your node[:ssh][:allowed_groups]:

  • vagrant (you're doing all your staging on local VMs, controlled by vagrant, right?)
  • ubuntu (if you're running on AWS, you definitely want this group added)
  • deploy (all apps get their own system user, and belong to the deploy group)
  • admin (system users with admin privileges. Pretty much everyone that is expected to be in charge of the infrastructure).

LWRP

ssh_authorized_keys

Ensures ~/.ssh & ~/.ssh/authorized_keys are setup correctly (mainly permissions). It also populates the authorized_keys file with specific keys:

ssh_authorized_keys "root" do
  home "/root"
  ssh_keys node[:ssh][:root_authorized_keys]
end

ssh_config

Handles sshd_config CRUD. This is how AllowGroups in /etc/ssh/sshd_config gets managed:

ssh_config "AllowGroups" do
  string "AllowGroups #{node[:ssh][:allowed_groups].join(' ')}"
  only_if { node[:ssh][:allowed_groups].any? }
end

ssh_key

Handles passphraseless key generation, makes remote hosts known (eg. github.com) and copies SSH keys between hosts. Can also create keys from pre-defined private and public ones.