12. Client machines

privacyIDEA lets you define Machine Resolvers to connect to existing machine stores. The idea is for users to be able to authenticate on those client machines. Not in all cases an online authentication request is possible, so that authentication items can be passed to those client machines.

In addition you need to define, which application on the client machine the user should authenticate to. Different application require different authentication items.

Therefore privacyIDEA can define application types. At the moment privacyIDEA knows the application luks, offline and ssh. You can write your own application class, which is defined in Application Class.

You need to assign an application and a token to a client machine. Each application type can work with certain token types and each application type can use additional parameters.

Note

Not all tokens work well with all applications!

12.1. SSH

Currently working token types: SSH

Parameters:

user (optional, default=root)

When the SSH token type is assigned to a client, the user specified in the user parameter can login with the private key of the SSH token.

In the sshd_config file you need to configure the AuthorizedKeysCommand. Set it to:

privacyidea-authorizedkeys

This will fetch the SSH public keys for the requesting machine.

The command expects a configuration file /etc/privacyidea/authorizedkeyscommand which looks like this:

[Default]
url=https://localhost
admin=admin
password=test
nosslcheck=False

Note

To disable a SSH key for all servers, you simple can disable the SSH token in privacyIDEA.

Warning

In a productive environment you should not set nosslcheck to true, otherwise you are vulnerable to man in the middle attacks.

12.2. LUKS

Currently working token types: Yubikey Challenge Response

Parameters:

slot The slot to which the authentication information should be written

partition The encrypted partition (usually /dev/sda3 or /dev/sda5)

These authentication items need to be pulled on the client machine from the privacyIDEA server.

Thus, the following script need to be executed with root rights (able to write to LUKS) on the client machine:

privacyidea-luks-assign @secrets.txt --clearslot --name salt-minion

For more information please see the man page of this tool.

12.3. Offline

Currently working token types: HOTP.

Parameters:

user The local user, who should authenticate. (Only needed when calling machine/get_auth_items)

count The number of OTP values passed to the client.

The offline application also triggers when the client calls a /validate/check. If the user authenticates successfully with the correct token (serial number) and this very token is attached to the machine with an offline application the response to validate/check is enriched with a “auth_items” tree containing the salted SHA512 hashes of the next OTP values.

The client can cache these values to enable offline authentication. The caching is implemented in the privacyIDEA PAM module.

The server increases the counter to the last offline cached OTP value, so that it will not be possible to authenticate with those OTP values available offline on the client side.