Sharkey: a service for managing certificates for use by OpenSSH
This looks very interesting, but I&#x27;m not quite sure I see what it really adds to the mix. This is a client&#x2F;server service, that bootstraps ssh host certificates, from long-lived TLS x509 <i>client</i> certs for the SSH servers?<p>And users still log in using bare keys, not certificates? (Ie: no real key revocation, expiry for <i>user</i> keys?)<p>What is the use-case here, that isn&#x27;t better served by simply automating the signing of ssh server certs (and user certs)? Is it moving the authorization from install&#x2F;key-gen time to run-time, and from the individual ssh servers to the central &quot;ssh authorization service&quot;?<p>I was initially hoping this is what I&#x27;ve been mulling over making for myself (a tool to make it easier to maintain ssh user and server certificates, along with an issuer log and revocation list (I take it the life time of these server certs are set so that a revocation list is only needed for the TLS certificates involved) -- but it seems like it might be a bit of a &quot;horizontal abstraction&quot; -- shifting work around without really simplifying the work flow all that much.<p>I&#x27;m sorry to come off negative, I love to see tools that help leverage the possibilities that&#x27;s already within ssh to make something better than &quot;TOFU&quot; and a mess of expired, forgotten, compromised and lost public keys in &quot;authorized_keys&quot; -- but I really think the only sane way to do that is to use full ssh certs for both hosts and users... And for <i>that</i> to scale, one would need some scripts&#x2F;a &quot;ssh CA&quot; utility or something.<p>I suppose this project might be useful if one already has a TLS&#x2F;x509 CA in-house that is used for authentication and authorization -- and one doesn&#x27;t want to patch ssh to use x509 certs directly?