Bug#592550: Provide support for SSH-Key authentication (Supports Eucalyptus and Amazon EC2)

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 10:56:05AM -0400, Kyle Moffett a écrit :
> 
> My latest patch (attached) provides a bunch more features for installing
> in virtualized environments.  You can also download it at this URL:
>   http://opensource.exmeritus.com/debian-ami/network-console-1.29+euca01.patch
> 
> Specifically, my patch allows you enable both password and public-key auth,
> by preseeding both a password and the authorized_keys URL.  If you don't
> want to enable password authentication, you can preseed "password-disabled"
> instead.
> 
> Additionally, I add a "publi-ip-url" key which causes the "IP" value in the
> network-console message to be obtained from the virtualized hosting system.
> 
> Finally, I rewrite the post-base-installer hook to automatically copy the
> authorized_keys file to the newly created user on the target system.  If
> a non-root user was created during the installation then the key is copied
> to that user, otherwise it is copied to root.

Hi Kyle,

the two first features are good additions.  However, I think that the third
feature, to add the SSH keys to the target system, should be at least disabled
by default, or removed, for the following two reasons:

 1) Public images should not contain public SSH keys that allow the owner of
    the private key to gain administrator priviledges, see:
    -  http://alestic.com/2011/06/ec2-ami-security
    -  https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=67299

 2) The same functionality could be achieved by dowloading the public keys
    at the first run of fresh images, from the same special URL.  I think that
    this is more flexible, and more images would benefit of this (for instance
    images that were not created through the network console).  Let's have
    this function in a separate package.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan