Configuration Server

ContainerSSH has the ability to configure the backend and the launched container dynamically based on the username and/or IP address. To do this ContainerSSH calls out to a configuration server if configured.

Configuration¶

The configserver webhook can be configured in the main configuration using the following structure:

configserver:
  <options>

The following options are supported:

Name	Type	Description
`url`	`string`	HTTP URL of the configuration server to call. Leaving this field empty disables the webhook.
`timeout`	`string`	Timeout for the webhook. Can be provided with time units (e.g. `6s`), defaults to nanoseconds if provided without a time unit.
`cacert`	`string`	CA certificate in PEM format or filename that contains the CA certificate. This is field is required for `https://` URL's on Windows because of Golang issue #16736
`cert`	`string`	Client certificate in PEM format or filename that contains the client certificate for x509 authentication with the configuration server.
`key`	`string`	Private key in PEM format or filename that contains the client certificate for x509 authentication with the configuration server.

Configuring TLS¶

TLS ensures that the connection between ContainerSSH and the configuration server cannot be intercepted using a Man-in-the-Mittle attack. We recommend checking the Mozilla Wiki for information about which configuration can be considered secure.

TLS version¶

The minimum TLS version for ContainerSSH 0.3 is 1.3.

Client authentication¶

In order to safeguard secrets in the configuration the configuration server should be protected by either firewalling it appropriately, but it is better to use x509 client certificates as a means of authentication.

We recommend using cfssl for creating the CA infrastructure. First we need to create the CA certificates:

cat > ca-config.json <<EOF
{
  "signing": {
    "default": {
      "expiry": "8760h"
    },
    "profiles": {
      "containerssh": {
        "usages": ["signing", "key encipherment", "server auth", "client auth"],
        "expiry": "8760h"
      }
    }
  }
}
EOF

cat > ca-csr.json <<EOF
{
  "CN": "ContainerSSH CA",
  "key": {
    "algo": "rsa",
    "size": 4096
  },
  "names": [
    {
      "C": "Your Country Code",
      "L": "Your Locality",
      "O": "Your Company",
      "OU": "",
      "ST": "Your State"
    }
  ]
}
EOF

cfssl gencert -initca ca-csr.json | cfssljson -bare ca

The resulting ca.pem should be added as a client CA in your configuration server. This CA does not have to be the same used to sign the server certificate.

Then we can create the client certificate:

cat > containerssh-csr.json <<EOF
{
  "CN": "ContainerSSH",
  "key": {
    "algo": "rsa",
    "size": 2048
  },
  "names": [
    {
      "C": "Your Country Code",
      "L": "Your Locality",
      "O": "Your Company",
      "OU": "",
      "ST": "Your State"
    }
  ]
}
EOF

cfssl gencert \
  -ca=ca.pem \
  -ca-key=ca-key.pem \
  -config=ca-config.json \
  -profile=containerssh \
  containerssh-csr.json | cfssljson -bare containerssh

The resulting containerssh.pem and containerssh-key.pem should then be added to the configuration as client credentials:

configserver:
  cert: /path/to/containerssh.pem
  key: /path/to/containerssh-key.pem

The configuration webhook¶

The configuration webhook is a simple JSON POST request to which the server must respond with a JSON response.

Note

We have an OpenAPI document available for the authentication and configuration server. You can check the exact values available there, or use the OpenAPI document to generate parts of your server code.

The config server will receive a request in following format:

{
  "username":"ssh username",
  "sessionId": "ssh session ID"
}

The configuration server will have to respond with the following response accompanied with the content type of application/json.

{
  "config": {
    // Provide a partial configuration here 
  }
}

The configuration JSON structure is identical to the YAML described in this reference manual and the full configuration can be dumped by running ./containerssh --dump-config. The server is free to return only partial options that it wants to set. Any options that are sent overwrite the ones from the configuration file.

Currently only the following options can be set from the configuration server: