This is a secure/locked-down bastion implemented as a Docker Container. It uses Alpine Linux as the base image and ships with support for Google Authenticator & DUO MFA support.

It was designed to be used on Kubernetes together with GitHub Authorized Keys to provide secure remote access to production clusters.

Here's a demo of what a user experiences when setting up Google Authenticator for the first time.

When using Duo as the MFA provider, this becomes even more magical because Duo supports automatic Push notifications to your mobile device. Just approve the request on your mobile phone (e.g. with a thumb press on iOS) when prompted.

Here's what it looks like when someone connects to the bastion if Slack notifications are enabled.

We recommend using Slack notifications for self-reporting.

• Any time a user accesses production systems, they should reply to the slack notification to justify their remote access.
• A "buddy" should approve the login by adding a reaction (e.g. ✅).
• If no one approves the login, it should trigger an incident response to track down the unauthorized access.

This project is part of our comprehensive "SweetOps" approach towards DevOps.

It's 100% Open Source and licensed under the APACHE2.

Refer to the Environment Variables section below to tune how the bastion operates.

$ docker run -p 1234:22 cloudposse/bastion:latest

$ git clone https://github.com/cloudposse/bastion.git
$ cd bastion
$ make docker:build

Run basic connection tests

$ make test

• Do not allow root (or sudo) access to this container as doing so would allow remote users to manipulate audit-logs in /var/log/sudo-io
• Use the bastion as a "jump host" for accessing other internal systems rather than installing a lot of unnecessary stuff, which increases the overall attack surface.
• Sync the contents of /var/log/sudo-io to a remote, offsite location. If using S3, we recommend enabling bucket-versioning.
• Use `github-authorized-keys to automatically provision users; or use the Helm chart.
• Bind-mount /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and /etc/group into the container as read-only
• Bind-mount /home into container; the bastion does not manage authorized keys

The following tables lists the most relevant environment variables of the bastion image and their default values.

Duo is a enterprise MFA provider that is very affordable. Details here: https://duo.com/pricing

Google Authenticator is a free & open source MFA solution. It's less secure than Duo because tokens are stored on the server under each user account.

The enforcer ensures certain conditions are satisfied. Currently, these options are supported.

The enforcer is able to send notifications to a slack channel anytime there is an SSH login.

The SSH auditor uses sudosh to record entire SSH sessions (stdin, stdout, and stderr).

This will require that users login with the /usr/bin/sudosh shell.

Update user's default shell by running the command: usermod -s /usr/bin/sudosh $username. By default, root will automatically be updated to use sudosh.

Use the sudoreplay command to audit/replay sessions.

The bastion does not attempt to manage user accounts. We suggest using GitHub Authorized Keys to provision user accounts and SSH keys. We provide a chart of how we recommend doing it.

The bastion was written to be easily extensible.

You can extend the enforcement policies by adding shell scripts to etc/enforce.d. Any scripts that are +x (e.g. chmod 755) will be executed at runtime.

• @neochrome, for providing a great basic bastion built on top of Alpine Linux
• @aws, for providing detailed instructions on how to do SSH session logging.
• @duo, for providing excellent documentation
• @google for contributing Google Authenticator to the Open Source community

Here's how you can quickly demo the bastion. We assume you have ~/.ssh/authorized_keys properly configured and your SSH key (e.g. ~/.ssh/id_rsa) added to your SSH agent.

$ docker run -it -p 1234:22 \
     -e MFA_PROVIDER=google-authenticator \
     -v ~/.ssh/authorized_keys:/root/.ssh/authorized_keys \
     cloudposse/bastion

Now, in another terminal you should be able to run:

$ ssh root@localhost -p 1234

The first time you connect, you'll be asked to setup your MFA device. Subsequently, each time you connect, you'll be prompted to enter your MFA token.

Got a question? We got answers.

File a GitHub issue, send us an email or join our Slack Community.

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Please use the issue tracker to report any bugs or file feature requests.

If you are interested in being a contributor and want to get involved in developing this project or help out with our other projects, we would love to hear from you! Shoot us an email.

In general, PRs are welcome. We follow the typical "fork-and-pull" Git workflow.

1. Fork the repo on GitHub
2. Clone the project to your own machine
3. Commit changes to your own branch
4. Push your work back up to your fork
5. Submit a Pull Request so that we can review your changes

NOTE: Be sure to merge the latest changes from "upstream" before making a pull request!

Copyright © 2017-2023 Cloud Posse, LLC

See LICENSE for full details.

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Erik Osterman	Marji Cermak