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sshnoports

The Atsign FoundationThe Atsign Foundation

GitHub License OpenSSF Scorecard SLSA 3

NoPorts CLI Binaries

This is the source code for the NoPorts Command Line Interface (CLI) binaries. See the website for more information, or its companion documentation site for technical and usage information.

Quick demo

sshnp

There are five binaries:-

at_activate : Command line tool to "cut" your atSigns cryptographic keys and place them in ~/.atsign/keys with .atKeys extension

sshnpd : The daemon that runs on the remote device

sshnp : The client that sets up a connection to the device which you can then ssh to via your localhost interface

srvd : This daemon acts as a rendezvous service and provides Internet routable IP/Ports for sshnpd and srv to connect to

srv : This client is called by sshnp to connect the local sshd to the rendezvous point

To get going you just need two (or three if you want to use your own srvd service) atSigns and their .atKeys files and the binaries (from the latest release). Once you have the atSigns (free or paid atSigns from atsign.com), drop the binaries in place on each machine and put the keys in ~/.atsign/keys directory. You will need a device atSign and a manager atSign, but each device can also have a unique device name using the --device argument.

Once in place you can start up the daemon first on the remote device. Remember to start the daemon on start up using rc.local script or similar, examples can be found in the templates directory in this package and in the release tar files. The daemon machine has to be running sshd even if only listening on localhost on an open port.

sshnpd.sh : bash script tmux-sshnpd.sh : bash script that uses tmux to provide realtime logging/view of the running daemon

./sshnpd --atsign <@your_devices_atsign> --manager <@your_manager_atsign> \
--device <iot_device_name> -u -s

Once that has started up you can run the client code from another machine. The client machine has to be running sshd even if only listening on localhost on an open port.

./sshnp --from <@your_manager_atsign> --to <@your_devices_atsign>  \
--host <atSign of srvd or FQDN/IP of client machine>  --device <iot_device_name> -s <>

The --host specifies the atSign of the srvd or the DNS name of the openssh server of the client machine that the remote device can connect to. If everything goes to plan the client will complete and tell you how to connect to the remote host for example.

Example command would be:-

./sshnp -f @cconstab -t @ssh_1 -d orac  -h @stream -s id_ed25519.pub

Which would output

ssh -p 39011 cconstab@localhost -i /home/cconstab/.ssh/id_ed25519

When you run this you will be connected to the remote machine via a reverse ssh tunnel from the remote device.

If you want to do this in a single command use $(<command>) for example, note you can specify a ssh public key so you do not get asked for passwords. Use ssh-keygen to generate a new ssh key if you do not have one already to access the remote sshd.

$(./sshnp -f @myclient -t @myserver -d mymachine -h @myrz -s id_ed25519.pub)

Atsign provides a srvd service but if you want to run your own srvd you will need a machine that has an internet IP and all ports 1024-65535 unfirewalled and an atSign for the daemon to use.

To run your own rendezvous service, simply run the srvd binary. You may omit the manager atSign to allow all atSigns to use your rendezvous service. There are also flags like -s to snoop on traffic passing through the service.

./srvd --atsign <@your_srvd_atsign> --manager <@manager_atsign> --ip <FQDN/IP address sent to clients>  

If you can now login using sshnp then you can now turn off sshd from listening on all external interfaces, and instead have ssh listen only on 127.0.0.1.

That is easily done by editing /etc/ssh/sshd_config

#Port 22
#AddressFamily any
ListenAddress 127.0.0.1
#ListenAddress ::

And restarting the ssh daemon. Please make sure you start the sshnpd on startup and reboot and check. As this is beta code it is suggested to wrap the daemon in a shell script or have sysctld make sure it is running.

My preference whilst testing was to run the daemon in TMUX so that it is easy to see the logs (-v).

sshnpd (daemon) in a docker container

The daemon can also be deployed as part of a pre-built docker container, that also has a number of networking tools installed. The container image is located on Dockerhub as atsigncompany/sshnpd:latest or you can build your own using the Dockerfile in the templates folder.

The image expects to have the atKeys for the atSign being used in the /atsign/.atsign/keys directory, this can be mounted as a volume at startup of the docker run command using -v $(pwd):/atsign/.atsign/keys/ assuming you are in the directory where the atKeys file is located. The full command to start the container would be something like this:-

docker run -v <location of atKeys>:/atsign/.atsign/keys/ atsigncompany/sshnpd "-a <atSign> -m <atSign> -d <device name> -v -u -s"

Once the container is running to log into the container the sshnp command would be used as normal, but you will log into the container not the host, from the container you could then log into the host or any other local network hosts you have access to.

Docker is very well documented and if you want to keep the container running after a reboot if for some reason the container crashes is all easily achieved.

TWO Ways to run SSH! no ports daemons (root access NOT required)

sshnpd.sh and srvd.sh - plain old shell scripts and log file

The scripts directory of this repo contains an example sshnpd.sh that can be run in a user's home directory (and assumes that the release has been untar'd there too). Copy the file of interest to your home directory, so the next release does not over write your config e.g.

cp ~/sshnp/sshnpd.sh ~/sshnpd.sh

Make sure to replace the placeholders for sending receiving and .

You might also want to add a crontab entry to run the script on reboot:

@reboot ~/sshnpd.sh > ~/sshnpd.log 2>&1

tmux-sshnpd.sh and tmux-srvd.sh - the power of tmux, highly recommended if tmux is installed sudo apt install tmux

This runs the daemon inside a tmux session, which can be connected to in order to see logs.

Copy the file of interest to your home directory, so the next release does not over write your config, e.g.

cp ~/sshnp/tmux-sshnpd.sh ~/tmux-sshnpd.sh

Once again, ensure that the placeholders are replaced, and this can be run by cron using:

@reboot ~/tmux-sshnpd.sh > ~/sshnpd.log 2>&1

systemd units

The systemd directory contains an example unit file with its own README.

Maintainers

Created by Atsign

Thoughts/bugs/contributions via PR all very welcome!

Original code by @cconstab