Every couple of months someone re-discovers SSH certificates, and blogs about them.
I'm guilty of it too. My blog post from 15 years ago is nowhere near as good as OP's post, but if I though me of 15 years ago lived up to my standards of today, I'd be really disappointed: https://blog.habets.se/2011/07/OpenSSH-certificates.html
I've known SSH certs for a while but never went through the effort of migrating away from keys. I'm very frustrated about manually managing my SSH keys across my different servers and devices though.
I assume you gathered a lot of thoughts over these 15 years.
Yes. Caveat: It might not really be worth it if all your infrastructure is managed by these newfangled infrastructure-as-code-things that are quick to roll out (OpenShift/OKD, Talos, etc.) and you have only one repo to change SSH keys (single cluster or single repo for all clusters).
There are some serious security benefits for larger organizations but it does not sound as if you are part of one.
In our dev/stg environment we reinstall half our machines every morning (largely to test our machine setup automation), and SSH host certificates make that so much nicer than having to persist host keys or remove/replace them in known_hosts. Highly recommended.
The author lists all the advantes of CA certificates, yet doesn't list the disadvantages. OTOH, all the many steps required to set it up make the disadvantages rather obvious.
Also, I've never had a security issue due to TOFU, have you?
Every couple of months someone re-discovers SSH certificates, and blogs about them.
I'm guilty of it too. My blog post from 15 years ago is nowhere near as good as OP's post, but if I though me of 15 years ago lived up to my standards of today, I'd be really disappointed: https://blog.habets.se/2011/07/OpenSSH-certificates.html
I've known SSH certs for a while but never went through the effort of migrating away from keys. I'm very frustrated about manually managing my SSH keys across my different servers and devices though.
I assume you gathered a lot of thoughts over these 15 years.
Should I invest in making the switch?
Yes. Caveat: It might not really be worth it if all your infrastructure is managed by these newfangled infrastructure-as-code-things that are quick to roll out (OpenShift/OKD, Talos, etc.) and you have only one repo to change SSH keys (single cluster or single repo for all clusters).
There are some serious security benefits for larger organizations but it does not sound as if you are part of one.
In our dev/stg environment we reinstall half our machines every morning (largely to test our machine setup automation), and SSH host certificates make that so much nicer than having to persist host keys or remove/replace them in known_hosts. Highly recommended.
The author lists all the advantes of CA certificates, yet doesn't list the disadvantages. OTOH, all the many steps required to set it up make the disadvantages rather obvious.
Also, I've never had a security issue due to TOFU, have you?
Sadly services such as Github don't support these so it's mostly good for internal infrastructure.
They do, for Enterprise customers only: https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/organizat...
They've rolled their host key one time, so there's little reason for them to use it on the host side.