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Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

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Re: Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

#31

Post by aleyan »

Neat.

I use the following incantation when authorizing folks to ssh into my servers via github public keys:

    curl https://github.com/[github name].keys >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
[github name] here should be replaced with github username of your friend or colleague. Really handy because I can just authorize them without a human request/response loop and manual key moving. Simple and no external tools needed. Normal caveats about authorizing people apply.

Re: Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

#32

Post by OJFord »

aleyan wrote: post #31

Neat. I use the following incantation when authorizing folks to ssh into my servers via github public keys: curl https://github.com/[github name].keys >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys [github name] here should be replaced with github username of your friend or colleague. Really handy because I can just authorize them without a human request/response loop and manual key moving. Simple and no external tools needed. Normal cav…

> https://github.com/[github name].keys

Didn't know about that, thanks!

Re: Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

#33

Post by rafadc »

I prefer using tmux for this to be a bit more secure. I wrote a blog post about this [0] since it is a bit of a pain in the ass to set up properly. Maybe you should explore this too for your product.

[0] http://joy.pm/2015/07/11/pairing_over_tmux.html

Re: Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

#34

Post by schlowmo »

OJFord wrote: post #32
aleyan wrote: post #31

Neat. I use the following incantation when authorizing folks to ssh into my servers via github public keys: curl https://github.com/[github name].keys >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys [github name] here should be replaced with github username of your friend or colleague. Really handy because I can just authorize them without a human request/response loop and manual key moving. Simple and no external tools needed. Normal cav…

> https://github.com/[github name].keys Didn't know about that, thanks!

This was the API Ben Cox used to gather more than a million of public keys from (active) Github users to analyze their strength or weakness, which finally led GitHub to revoke the vulnerable/weak keys and notify the users.[0]

Edit: Better source.

[0] https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/auditing-github-users-keys

Re: Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

#35

Post by jdc0589 »

OJFord wrote: post #7

Would be neat if having done teleconsole -i other_users_github_id my teleconsole session ID would be sent to server along with my Github ID (optionally other user's too) so that they could teleconsole -j my_github_id to join instead of having to share session ID and fumble around with that. No more/less secure that I can see, but it would be more convenient.

would be nice, but it would likely introduce some additional complexity for instances where there might be more than one live session spawned by a user.

Re: Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

#36

Post by jdc0589 »

e_proxus wrote: post #27

Are there any advantages to using this instead of exposing port 22 temporarily via ngrok advantages adding your friend public key to authorized_keys? (Which has the added advantage of being pure, unmodified SSH) https://ngrok.com

first thing that comes to mind is that once the session is dead, you don't have any artifacts laying around (misc authorized keys)

Re: Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

#37

Post by jdc0589 »

hughes wrote: post #22
eof wrote: post #21

I'm confused and have a couple questions: 1. Why would I want someone to ssh into my machine -- at least with the frequency that a service to help me do it is valuable? 2. How is this easier/better than saying 'hey bro whats your ssh pub id? -- eh.. do `cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub` Over all this seems like a tool that only super technical people would ever use, and for those people adding a key to authorized keys is trivia…

Yeah, "just share the Teleconsole ID" seems like an identical step to "just share the public key".

"just share the public key" doesn't solve firewall, nat, etc network issues that might be a barrier. If you went that route, you'd likely want something like ngrok too.

Re: Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

#38

Post by kordless »

cfv wrote: post #23

What kind of abuse prevention measures does this have in place? As it stands it looks like a super convenient way to scp garbage into other people's computers and I'm not sure I'm sold on that.

You argument is biased and non-factual. Default ssh measures keep un-trusted entities from gaining access, normally. Conversely, once access is granted by the admin to trusted entities, the normal UNIX permissions continue to provide means by which access to the file system is limited by user permissions. Thus, simply by an admin granting access to a system, your (hypothetical) arguments become false and pointless to discuss.

Re: Show HN: Invite friends to SSH into your laptop using their GitHub handle

#40

Post by vhost- »

e_proxus wrote: post #27

Are there any advantages to using this instead of exposing port 22 temporarily via ngrok advantages adding your friend public key to authorized_keys? (Which has the added advantage of being pure, unmodified SSH) https://ngrok.com

I don't like using the TCP functionality of ngrok because it seems to always use the same hostname (0.tcp.ngrok.io) with a random port. So anyone can just scan for open ports on that domain and start trying to connect to things. The HTTP forwarding at least gives you a random subdomain.
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