LIAM - Linux Account Manager

A tool for managing user and server SSH access to any number of servers.

Features

• Easily manage SSH key access for all accounts on your servers.
• Manage user access and server-to-server access rules.
• Integrate with your LDAP directory service for user authorization.
• Automatically remove server access from people when they leave your company or team.
• Provides an easy interface for users to upload their own public keys.
• Designate server administrators and let them manage access to their server.
• Create group-based access rules for easy management.
• Specify SSH access options such as command=, nopty etc on your access rules.
• All access changes are logged to the database and to the system logs. Granting of access is also reported by email.
• Be notified when a server becomes orphaned (has no active administrators).

Requirements

• An LDAP directory service
• Apache 2.4 or higher
• PHP 7.2 or higher
• PHP JSON extension
• PHP LDAP extension
• PHP mbstring (Multibyte String) extension
• PHP MySQL extension
• PHP ssh2 extension
• MySQL (5.5+) or MariaDB database

Installation

1. Clone the repo somewhere outside of your default Apache document root. e.g.(/var/www/liam_core)

2. Add the following directives to your Apache configuration (eg. virtual host config):

   DocumentRoot /var/www/liam_core
   DirectoryIndex init.php
   FallbackResource /init.php
   

3. Create a MySQL user and database (run in MySQL shell):

   CREATE USER 'liam-user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
   CREATE DATABASE `liam-db` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8mb4;
   GRANT ALL ON `liam-db`.* to 'liam-user'@'localhost';
   

4. Copy the file config/config-sample.ini to config/config.ini and edit the settings as required.

5. Set up authnz_ldap for your virtual host (or any other authentication module that will pass on an Auth-user variable to the application).

6. Set scripts/ldap_update.php to run on a regular cron job.

7. Generate an SSH key pair to synchronize with. SSH Key Authority will expect to find the files as config/keys-sync and config/keys-sync.pub for the private and public keys respectively. The key must be in pem format. The following command will generate the key in the required format:

   ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -m PEM -C 'comment' -f config/keys-sync
   

8. Install the SSH key synchronization daemon. For systemd:

   1. Copy services/systemd/keys-sync.service to /etc/systemd/system/
   2. Modify ExecStart path and User as necessary. If SSH Key Authority is installed under /home, disable ProtectHome.
   3. systemctl daemon-reload
   4. systemctl enable keys-sync.service

Usage

Anyone in the LDAP group defined under admin_group_cn in config/config.ini will be able to manage accounts and servers.

Key distribution

SSH Key Authority distributes authorized keys to your servers via SSH. It does this by:

1. Connecting to the server with SSH, authorizing as the keys-sync user.
2. Writing the appropriate authorized keys to named user files in /var/local/keys-sync/ (eg. all authorized keys for the root user will be written to /var/local/keys-sync/root).

This means that your SSH installation will need to be reconfigured to read authorized keys from /var/local/keys-sync/.

Please note that doing so will deny access to any existing SSH public key authorized in the default ~/.ssh directories.

Under OpenSSH, the configuration changes needed are:

AuthorizedKeysFile /var/local/keys-sync/%u
StrictModes no

StrictModes must be disabled because the files will all be owned by the keys-sync user.

The file /var/local/keys-sync/keys-sync must exist, with the same contents as the config/keys-sync.pub file in order for the synchronization daemon to authenticate.

Screenshots

Homepage overview

Server listing

Server account access management

Activity log

Getting started guide for new users