Feature: Key based authentication

Many deployments only support ssh via key based authentication. Cockpit should allow users to connect to remote machines via ssh using key based authentication.

Notes

Prior art

• GitHub

Stories

Phillip J. Fry leads a small IT at a moderately sized firm. His company runs their applications on a few virtual machines in the public cloud. Password based authentication is not permitted. SSH access is granted to those machines by adding his public key to his account with the providers API.

Phillip:

• Connects to cockpit running on his local machine.
• Philip is able to connect to and add his cloud machines to his cockpit dashboard.

Implementation Notes and Technical Limitations

• Do we want to support logging into the system based on being able to unlock the users, private key? Similar to pam_ssh.
• In the past there was some discussion of being able to log into a machine other than localhost. Do we want work that in here.
• I think we need something in the case where the sysadmin does not have a system that can do a cockpit install, for example, if he's running Windows, OSX or Ubuntu (even though I hope Cockpit will be packaged for Ubuntu).