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jump-cli

IMPORTANT!

This software reduces the 2FA authentication to one factor AND IS PROBABLY INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE SECURITY POLICIES OF YOUR HPC FACILITY! For example, usage of this software at CINECA would result in personal liability for security breaches that can be connected to your credentials.

Motivation

The most secure system is one that nobody can use!

Running high-throughput simulations on HPC clusters requires uninterrupted access to the login nodes of the target machine, but the 2FA authentication methods generating very short lived keys makes it almost impossible to perform this kind of activity.

jump-cli is just a few lines of code that automate the generation of ssh keys with step-cli. It stores all your credentials in a password protected configuration file and uses them to generate a new ssh-key with step-cli every two hours. The code is as small as possible so that you can easily adapt it to your needs. It currently targets Linux but can be easily ported to other OSes.

Configuration

Just run

python ./gen_config.py

and insert your credentials and the TOTP secret in base32. A password protected configuration file is generated and stored into the config directory.

Usage

Just pass the same options that you use for step-cli, for example:

    ./jump-cli ssh certificate "your-user" --provisioner your-prov ~./ssh/your-shiny-new-keys

jump-cli will start a never ending loop to update you keys every 2 hours.

Security

Obviously this approach defeats 2FA, and the confidentiality of your credentials is only secured by the password encrypted configuration file. This is basically the same as having a password protected key file, with the inconvenience that your credentials may also give access to other services. This is not at all advisable, but it's unfortunately the only possibility for running high-throughput simulations on the HPC platforms that I can access for the time being.

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Automates step-cli ssh certificate generation for headless machines

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