Glider
"In het verleden behaalde resultaten bieden geen garanties voor de toekomst"
About this blog

These are the ramblings of Matthijs Kooijman, concerning the software he hacks on, hobbies he has and occasionally his personal life.

Most content on this site is licensed under the WTFPL, version 2 (details).

Questions? Praise? Blame? Feel free to contact me.

My old blog (pre-2006) is also still available.

See also my Mastodon page.

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Automatically remotely attaching tmux and forwarding things

GnuPG logo

I recently upgraded my systems to Debian Stretch, which caused GnuPG to stop working within Mutt. I'm not exactly sure what was wrong, but I discovered that GnuPG version 2 changed quite some things and relies more heavily on the gpg-agent, and I discovered that recent SSH version can forward unix domain socket instead of just TCP sockets, which allows forwarding a gpg-agent connection over SSH.

Until now, I had my GPG private keys stored on my server, Tika, where my Mutt mail client also runs. However, storing private keys, even with a passphrase, on permanentely connected multi-user system never felt quite right. So this seemed like a good opportunity to set up proper forwarding for my gpg agent, and keep my private keys confined to my laptop.

I already had some small scripts in place to easily connect to my server through SSH, attach to the remote tmux session (or start it), set up some port forwards (in particular a reverse port forward for SSH so my mail client and IRC client could open links in my browser), and quickly reconnect when the connection fails. However, once annoyance was that when the connection fails, the server might not immediately notice, so reconnecting usually left me with failed port forwards (since the remote listening port was still taken by the old session). This seemed like a good occasion to fix that as wel.

The end result is a reasonably complex script, that is probably worth sharing here. The script can be found in my scripts git repository. On the server, it calls an attach script, but that's not much more than attaching to tmux, or starting a new session with some windows if no session is running yet.

The script is reasonably well-commented, including an introduction on what it can do, so I will not repeat that here.

For the GPG forwarding, I based upon this blogpost. There, they suggest configuring an extra-socket in gpg-agent.conf, but I've found that gpg-agent already created an extra socket (whose path I could query with gpgconf --list-dirs), so I didn't use that extra-socket configuration line. They also talk about setting StreamLocalBindUnlink to clean up a lingering socket when creating a new one, but that is already handled by my script instead.

Furthermore, to prevent a gpg-agent from being autostarted by gnupg serverside (in case the forwarding fails, or when I would connect without this script, etc.), I added no-autostart to ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf. I'm not running systemd user session on my server, but if you are you might need to disable or mask some ssh-agent sockets and/or services to prevent systemd from creating sockets for ssh-agent and starting it on-demand.

My next step is to let gpg-agent also be my ssh-agent (or perhaps just use plain ssh-agent) to enforce confirming each SSH authentication request. I'm currently using gnome-keyring / seahorse as my SSH agent, but that just silently approves everything, which doesn't really feel secure.

 
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Copyright by Matthijs Kooijman - most content WTFPL