Never place your SSH private keys on the bastion instance.For more in-depth information, see OS Hardening Principles on the site.Īlways remember the following when configuring your bastion:
It’s beyond the scope of this post to discuss hardening in detail, but doing so involves tasks like enabling SELinux, using a remote syslog server for logs, and configuring host-based intrusion detection. For additional security, you can harden the instance further. The bastion should also be set up with a security group that’s configured to listen only on the SSH port (TCP/22). We suggest that the instance you use for your bastion be purpose-built and that you use it only as a bastion and not for anything else. The first step in using SSH agent forwarding with EC2 instances is to configure a bastion in your VPC. That’s the approach I’ll discuss in this post. This allows an administrator to connect from the bastion to another instance without storing the private key on the bastion. One solution is to use SSH agent forwarding (ssh-agent) on the client. But using key pairs with a bastion host can present a challenge-connecting to instances in the private subnets requires a private key, but you should never store private keys on the bastion.
Amazon bastion switch password#
Using key files can reduce the chance of somebody trying to guess the password to gain access to the instance. SSH and bastion serversīy default, Linux instances in EC2 use SSH key files for authentication instead of SSH usernames and passwords. Using this configuration improves security because you don’t have to expose the management ports of your Linux instances to the Internet or to other subnets in your VPC.
Amazon bastion switch how to#
In this post, I’ll look at how to use SSH agent forwarding to allow administrators to securely connect to Linux instances in private Amazon VPC subnets.
Ryan returns this week with a post that focuses on bastion hosts for Linux instances in private Amazon VPC subnets. In an earlier blog post, Ryan Holland, a Principal Partner Solutions Architect in AWS, showed how to secure access to multiple Amazon EC2 Windows instances running behind a Windows Remote Desktop Gateway acting as a bastion host. Another user on the system with the ability to modify files could potentially use this key to authenticate as you. When you set up agent forwarding, a socket file is created on the forwarding host, which is the mechanism by which the key can be forwarded to your destination. Important note: You should enable SSH agent forwarding with caution. Updated May 21, 2014: Clarified that for the Mac, the private key is stored in memory and the passphrase in the keychain.
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