Public Key and Multi Factor Based Centralized SSH Authentication System for a Cloud Based Environment Using LDAP

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to implement a system that provides capability to centrally manage key based SSH authentication and provide access control system with multi factor authentication. This provides multiple users to access multiple servers in a cloud based environment using SSH with enhanced secure access and manageability.The problem addressed here is to avoid sharing a common private key, password or to avoid using common accounts for remote SSH login. This system helps to centrally manages users, identities and related attributes and also shows how secure it is, in comparison to other systems. This implementation is also focused on a cloud infrastructure which could scale timely.This thesis discusses the existing systems and compares the advantage of using the proposed implementation and design over other systems that are complex and hard to maintain. The real implementation is focused on a practical scenario for an organization which already has a remote cloud environment where developers and administrators need to access the servers in cloud infrastructure for different purposes. The solution suggested here optimizes the access control mechanism for SSH and also provides easy to manage, centralized, access granting, revocation and tracking capability. This implementation includes a user interface that can be used to easily do all the administrative work and that makes system administrators life easier and avoids repetitive work. This project is mostly based on user management, access control, multi factor authentication and centralizing the administrative work. This study would be much useful to system administrators who are in both networking and systems engineering field.