In order to use our service, you will have to use the Secure Shell protocol (SSH) to connect to your capsul.
SSH is a very old tool, created back when the internet was a different place, with different use cases and concerns. In many ways, the protocol has failed to evolve to meet the needs of our 21st century global internet. Instead, the users of SSH (tech heads, sysadmins, etc) have had to evolve our processes to work around SSH's limitations.
These days, we use SSH + public-key cryptography to establish secure connections to our servers. If you are not familiar with the concept of public key cryptography, cryptographic signatures, or diffie-hellman key exchange, you may wish to see the wikipedia article for a refresher.
Computers can generate "key pairs" which consist of a public key and a private key. Given a public key pair A:
When computers A and B are trying to establish a secure connection for the first time, we assume that the way they communicate right now is NOT secure. That means that someone on the network between A and B can read & modify all messages they send to each-other! You might be able to see where this is heading...
When computer A sends its public key to computer B, someone in the middle (lets call it computer E, or Eve) could record that message, save it, and then replace it with a forged message to computer B containing public key E (from a key pair that computer E generated). If this happens, when computer B sends an encrypted message to computer A, B thinks that A's public key is actually public key E, so it will use public key E to encrypt. And again, computer E in the middle can intercept the message, and they can decrypt it as well because they have private key E. Finally, they can relay the same message to computer A, this time encrypted with computer A's public key. This is called a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack.
Without some additional verification method, Computer A AND Computer B can both be duped and the connection is NOT really secure.
Now that we have seen how key exhange works, and we understand that in order to prevent MITM attacks, all participants have to have a way of knowing whether a given public key is authentic or not, I can explain what I meant when I said
> [SSH] has failed to evolve to meet the needs of our 21st century global internet
In order to explain this, let's first look at how a different, more modern protocol, Transport Layer Security (or TLS) solved this problem. TLS, (still sometimes called by its olde name "Secure Sockets Layer", or SSL) was created to enable HTTPS, and allow internet users to log into web sites securely and purchase things online by entering their credit card number. Of course, this required security that actually works; if someone could MITM attack the connection, they could easily steal tons of credit card numbers and passwords.
In order to enable this, a new sub-protocol called X.509 was created. X.509 is a standard related to the data format of certificates and keys (public keys and private keys), but it also defines a simple and easy way to determine whether a given certificate (public key) is authentic. X.509 introduced the concept of a Certificate Authority, or CA. These CAs were supposed to be bank-like public institutions of power which everyone could trust. The CA would create a key pair on an extremely secure computer, and then a CA Certificate (the public side of that key pair) would be distributed along with every copy of Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Then folks who wanted to run a secure web server could generate thier OWN key pair for thier web server, and pay the CA to sign thier web server's X.509 certificate (public key) with the highly protected CA private key. Critically, issue date, expiration date, and the domain name of the web server, like foo.example.com, would have to be included in the x.509 certiciate along with the public key. This way, when the user types https://foo.example.com into thier web browser:
This system enabled the internet to grow and flourish: purchasing from a CA was the only way to get a valid X.509 certificate for a website, and guaranteeing authenticity was in the CA's business interest. The CAs kept their private keys behind razor wire and armed guards, and followed strict rules to ensure that only the right people got thier certificates signed. Only the CA's themselves or anyone who had enough power to force them to create a fraudulent certificate would be able to execute MITM attacks.
The TLS+X.509 Certificate Authority works well for HTTP and other application protocols, because
However, this would never fly with SSH. You have to understand, SSH does not come from Microsoft, it does not come from Apple, in fact, it does not even come from Linux or GNU. SSH comes from BSD. Berkeley Software Distribution. Most people don't even know what BSD is. It's Deep Nerdcore material. The people who maintain SSH are not playing around, they would never allow themselves to be subjugated by so-called "Certificate Authorities". So, what are they doing instead? Where is SSH at? Well, back when it was created, computer security was easy — a very minimal defense was enough to deter attackers. In order to help prevent these MITM attacks, instead of something like X.509, SSH uses a policy called Trust On First Use (TOFU).
The SSH client application keeps a record of every server it has ever connected to in a file ~/.ssh/known_hosts.
(the tilde ~ here represents the user's home directory, /home/username on linux, C:\Users\username on Windows, and /Users/username on MacOS).
If the user asks the SSH client to connect to a server it has never seen before, it will print a prompt like this to the terminal:
The authenticity of host 'fooserver.com (69.4.20.69)' can't be established.
ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:EXAMPLE1xY4JUVhYirOVlfuDFtgTbaiw3x29xYizEeU.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])?
Here, the SSH client is displaying the fingerprint (SHA256 hash) of the public key provided by the server at fooserver.com. Back in the day, when SSH was created, servers lived for months to years, not minutes, and they were installed by hand. So it would have been perfectly reasonable to call the person installing the server and ask them to log into it & read off the host key fingerprint over the phone. After verifing that the fingerprints match in the phone call, the user would type yes to continue.
After the SSH client connects to a server for the first time, it will record the server's IP address and public key in the ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. All subsequent connections will simply check the public key the server presents against the public key it has recorded in the ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. If the two public keys match, the connection will continue without prompting the user, however, if they don't match, the SSH client will display a scary warning message:
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ WARNING: POSSIBLE DNS SPOOFING DETECTED! @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ The ECDSA host key for fooserver.com has changed, and the key for the corresponding IP address 69.4.20.42 is unknown. This could either mean that DNS SPOOFING is happening or the IP address for the host and its host key have changed at the same time. @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY! Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)! It is also possible that a host key has just been changed. The fingerprint for the ECDSA key sent by the remote host is SHA256:EXAMPLEpDDefcNcIROtFpuTiHC1j3iNU74aaKFO03+0. Please contact your system administrator. Add correct host key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message. Offending ECDSA key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts:1 remove with: ssh-keygen -f "/root/.ssh/known_hosts" -R "fooserver.com" ECDSA host key for fooserver.com has changed and you have requested strict checking. Host key verification failed.
This is why it's called Trust On First Use: SSH protocol assumes that when you type yes in response to the prompt during your first connection, you really did verify that the server's public key fingerprint matches. If you type yes here without checking the server's host key somehow, you could add an attackers public key to the trusted list in your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file; if you type yes blindly, you are completely disabling all security of the SSH connection. It can be fully man-in-the-middle attacked & you are vulnerable to spying, command injection, result-falsification, the whole nine yards.
So what are technologists to do? Most cloud providers don't "provide" a secure and reliable way to get the SSH host public keys
for instances that users create on thier platform. For example, see this
question posted by a frustrated user trying to secure thier connection to a digitalocean droplet.
Besides using the provider's HTTPS-based console to log into the machine & directly read the public key, most of the time,
providers recommend using a "userdata script", which runs when the machine boots, to upload the machine's SSH public keys to a
trusted location, like Backblaze B2 or
Amazon S3[1] storage for later retrieval by users.
As an example, I wrote a
userdata script which does this
for my own cloud compute management tool called
rootsystem.
Later in the process, rootsystem will
download the public keys from the Object Storage provider
and add them to the ~/.ssh/known_hosts file
before finally
invoking the ssh client against the cloud host.
Personally, I think it's disgusting and irresponsible to require users to go through that much work just to be able to connect to their instance securely. However, this practice appears to be an industry standard. It's gross, but it's where we're at right now.
So for capsul, we obviously wanted to do better. We wanted to make this kind of thing as easy as possible for the user, so I'm proud to announce as of today, capsul SSH host key fingerprints will be displayed on the capsul detail page, as well as the host's SSH public keys themselves in ~/.ssh/known_hosts format. Users can simply copy and paste these keys into thier ~/.ssh/known_hosts file and connect with confidence that they are not being MITM attacked.
Glad you asked 😜.
TLS is great, except it has one problem: the X.509 CA system centralizes power and structurally invites abuse. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But there is hope for the future: with the invention of Bitcoin in 2009, we now have a new tool to use for authority-free secure consensus. Some bright folks have forked Bitcoin to produce Namecoin, a DNS-like public blockchain which is merge-mined with Bitcoin, and which allows users to register and trade names, including domain names . In fact, Namecoin features a specification for associating public keys with domain names and easy-to-use client software packages capable of resolving these names & public keys, capable of replacing both the DNS system and X.509 Certificate Authority system.
For more information on how to get started with Namecoin, see my Namecoin guide for webmasters.
Cheers and best wishes,
Forest
[1] fuck amazon