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Open-sourcing OpenPubkey SSH (OPKSSH): integrating single sign-on with SSH

OPKSSH makes it easy to SSH with single sign-on technologies like OpenID Connect, thereby removing the need to manually manage and configure SSH keys. It does this without adding a trusted party other than your identity provider (IdP).

We are excited to announce OPKSSH (OpenPubkey SSH) has been open-sourced under the umbrella of the OpenPubkey project. While the underlying protocol OpenPubkey became an open source Linux foundation project in 2023, OPKSSH was closed source and owned by BastionZero (now Cloudflare). Cloudflare has gifted this code to the OpenPubkey project, making it open source.

In this post, we describe what OPKSSH is, how it simplifies SSH management, and what OPKSSH being open source means for you.

A cornerstone of modern access control is single sign-on (SSO), where a user authenticates to an identity provider (IdP), and in response the IdP issues the user a token. The user can present this token to prove their identity, such as “Google says I am Alice”. SSO is the rare security technology that both increases convenience — users only need to sign in once to get access to many different systems — and increases security.

OpenID Connect (OIDC) is Continue reading