SSH Configuration Interface. Design and Implementation of a "student self-service portal" for accessing to Linux-VMs

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Computer Science - Software, grade: 1.7, University of Applied Sciences Ulm, course: Computer Science, language: English, abstract: Secure Shell (SSH) is mainly used for managing most of the worlds web servers. It creates a secure channel on top of an unsecured network by using the client-server model. The problem arises with the increase in the number of clients that leads to a corresponding increase in the maintenance work for the server administration. This thesis offers an insight into this problem and the solution to it. The SSH Configuration Interface (SSH CI) is one possible solution to simplify the process. Its a client-server application that provides a simple but intuitive user interface (UI) to the users, so they can upload their public key directly to the server. The server thereon handles the request and, thus, excludes the need of an administration interaction from this process. The SSH protocol uses encryption to secure the connection between a client and a server. Its mainly used to log into a remote machine and execute commands, but there are other useful features available like tunneling and forwarding of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) ports. An SSH connection supports multiple methods of authentication, the most common being the public key authentication. The advantage of it over a simple password, for example, is security and flexibility. Public key authentication provides a security level that even extremely long passwords cant offer. In a situation where multiple users have access to the same account on the server by using SSH key authentication, it is easy to revoke access to any of them just by deleting their public key from the server. No password has to be shared across the users.