Note: This project has moved to @zen-trust. The newer project also uses a brand-new, Node.js-based tech stack.

Fides is an SSH certificate signing server. It enables zero-trust infrastructure for your engineers by dynamically, and transparently, issuing short-lived certificates with clearly defined permissions.

Fides is in active development and not yet complete. Want to help out? Contributions welcome. Let's make enterprise SSH authorization a commodity, together.

Fides provides your servers with a trusted CA certificate, and signs your OpenSSH certificates (generated by ssh-keygen) with the same key. As someone attempts to log into a server, sshd will check the signed OpenSSH certificate and authorize the user.
As signatures are checked against the public key of your CA, this works without copying your public key around - even for servers you have never dialed into before!

Why use Fides?
You could certainly just sign the certificates yourself, set them to never expire (or maybe a year), hand them out to your coworkers, and call it a day. It's no magic! What Fides enables you to do instead is dynamically generating signatures for a limited period of time, with a scoped set of privileges, all bound to your corporate accounts.

How to authorize Instead of SSH-ing directly into servers, you'll need to sign in to the fides command-line application first. It performs an OAuth device authorization, requests a certificate, and starts SSH with the proper parameters. This may look like so:

fides ssh some.host.tld

# Fides forwards all arguments to ssh
fides ssh -o ForwardAgent=yes some.host.tld

The ssh sub-command is optional: You can even symlink ssh to the fides executable, and continue to use it as a stand-in, with all the same options being forwarded.

Fides requires a database to run; it understands everything there's a DBAL driver for, but you'll probably want to use SQLite, PostgreSQL, or MySQL.

Set up the project using composer:

composer create-project radiergummi/fides

During the setup, a CA certificate pair will be automatically generated. Make sure to keep these files secret!

After initializing Fides, you should create an initial admin account:

php bin/console user:add [email protected] --role=ROLE_ADMIN [--password=<SECURE PASSWORD>]

You may use this account to sign in to the web interface and configure Fides.

Note:
Fides doesn't require you to use local accounts -- in fact, it discourages it. Instead, you should connect it to your existing account provider using OAuth federation. Fides includes pre-configured connectors for common providers like Microsoft 365, Google Business, GitHub or Okta, but also allows you to set up any other OAuth-enabled provider.

TODO: Continue documentation