Warning

I no longer maintain this repository

I have substantially less free time these days for OSS, I don't use Windows as my daily driver anymore, and there seem to be much better options for using a security key within WSL in 2024 and beyond (for example).

windows-fido-bridge

This repository implements an OpenSSH security key middleware that allows you to use a FIDO/U2F security key (for example, a YubiKey) to SSH into a remote server from a machine running Windows 10 with Windows Subsystem for Linux or Cygwin.

Requirements

At a minimum, you must have the following in order to use this repository:

• A local Linux distribution running inside WSL with OpenSSH 8.3 or newer installed.
  • An earlier version of OpenSSH will not work because of an incompatibility with Microsoft's WebAuthn API.
• A remote server running OpenSSH 8.2 or newer.
  • The aforementioned API incompatibility does not affect the remote server, so it does not need OpenSSH 8.3.
• A FIDO/U2F security key that supports Ed25519 or ECDSA.

Cygwin is also supported on a best-effort basis; see the Cygwin section under Tips below.

Install

You may want to visit the wiki that details how to get a Linux distro with a version of OpenSSH that's new enough to work with windows-fido-bridge.

From the apt repository

The recommended method of installing windows-fido-bridge is to use its apt repository at apt.mgbowen.dev. Go to that link and follow its instructions to set up access to the repository for your operating system, then run the following:

sudo apt install windows-fido-bridge

From source

You can also build this repository from source:

sudo apt install build-essential cmake g++-mingw-w64-x86-64 git

git clone https://github.com/mgbowen/windows-fido-bridge.git
cd windows-fido-bridge
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make -j $(nproc)
make test
sudo make install

There is also the option of packaging the built binaries into a deb package and installing that package instead of using make install:

sudo apt install debhelper

make package
sudo apt install ./windows-fido-bridge_*_*.deb ./windows-fido-bridge-skapi*_*_*.deb

Note that if you install the deb package, apt will place the built binaries in /usr/lib, whereas make install will place them, by default, in /usr/local/lib. The distinction is important to remember when you set the SecurityKeyProvider option when calling ssh or the SSH_SK_PROVIDER environment variable.

Compile-time options

You may set the following options when you invoke cmake:

• BUILD_TESTS: Whether or not to build tests. Defaults to ON, set to OFF to disable.
• SK_API_VERSION: The version of the OpenSSH security key API to target. The following versions are required to use with their respective OpenSSH versions:
  • 5: OpenSSH 8.3
  • 7: OpenSSH 8.4 (default)
  • 9: OpenSSH 8.9

Use

First, you need to generate a key tied to your FIDO/U2F-compliant security key. To do that, you need to tell OpenSSH what middleware library to use. If you used the installation instructions above, you can use the following command:

SSH_SK_PROVIDER=libwindowsfidobridge.so ssh-keygen -t ecdsa-sk

If everything goes well, you should see a Windows dialog pop up asking you to use your security key. After you confirm and tap your security key, OpenSSH should then write a public/private key pair to disk. After adding the public key to your remote server's .ssh/authorized_keys file, you can then authenticate using the following command:

ssh -oSecurityKeyProvider=libwindowsfidobridge.so remote-server

You should now be logged in to your remote server!

Tips

Turn on debug logging

If you're having problems and want more information to help you solve it, or if you're just curious about what's going on as windows-fido-bridge executes, you can turn on debug logging by setting the WINDOWS_FIDO_BRIDGE_DEBUG environment variable to any value before executing an OpenSSH executable.

Force user verification

Note that this is only possible if both your client and server are running OpenSSH 8.4 or newer!

OpenSSH 8.4 added the ability to require user verification in order to log in to an SSH server via a security key. This means you can require the user to, e.g. provide a PIN to the security key or place their finger on a security key's fingerprint reader (if it has one) before being granted access to a remote server.

When using a security key that requires user verification, OpenSSH will prompt the user for their PIN and pass that PIN to the security key middleware, which then passes it to the security key. However, presumably for security reasons, Microsoft's WebAuthn API does not permit a middleware to prompt for a PIN. Despite this, OpenSSH will always prompt the user for a PIN before passing control to a security key middleware, and OpenSSH does not provide the ability to disable this prompt, which means that you are prompted for a PIN twice: once from OpenSSH and once from Windows.

To get around this, you can force windows-fido-bridge to create a security key assertion with user verification even if OpenSSH is configured not to do so, allowing you to only be prompted for a PIN once by Windows. There are two ways to enable this behavior:

• When creating an OpenSSH security key-backed SSH key, set the FIDO application to ssh:windows-fido-bridge-verify-required, like so:

  SSH_SK_PROVIDER=libwindowsfidobridge.so \
      ssh-keygen -t ecdsa-sk -Oapplication=ssh:windows-fido-bridge-verify-required
  

  The key will be created normally; when you use it to log in, windows-fido-bridge will ask for a PIN (if that's how your security key performs user verification), but OpenSSH will not.
• Set the WINDOWS_FIDO_BRIDGE_FORCE_USER_VERIFICATION environment variable to any value before logging in to a remote server with ssh. You do not need to set it before generating the SSH key with ssh-keygen -t ecdsa-sk.

Note that it is still possible to create an OpenSSH security key-backed key with windows-fido-bridge that requires user verification using ssh-keygen -Overify-required ..., and windows-fido-bridge will respect asking for user verification when logging in with keys that are configured as such.

Finally, you need to enforce that the remote server checks for user verification before permitting a user to log in with a security key. You can do so by prepending the public SSH key in your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file with verify-required, like so:

# ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
verify-required sk-ecdsa-sha2-nistp256@openssh.com AAAA[...]abcdef user@server

Use with ssh-agent

If you want to use a security key-backed SSH key with ssh-agent, you should make sure to either invoke ssh-add with the -S argument pointing to libwindowsfidobridge.so or set the SSH_SK_PROVIDER environment variable before calling ssh-add. Note that you must specify the full path to the library when passing it to ssh-add for ssh-agent to accept it. For example:

ssh-add -S /usr/lib/libwindowsfidobridge.so

# or

SSH_SK_PROVIDER=/usr/lib/libwindowsfidobridge.so ssh-add

You may also completely omit the explicit library specification if you place the SSH_SK_PROVIDER environment variable definition in your .bashrc or whatever your shell's equivalent file is.

Use from Windows

If you want to be able to run ssh from a Windows command prompt without first being in a WSL prompt, you can create a directory somewhere on your Windows filesystem (for example, C:\Users\<username>\bin), add that directory to your PATH, and create a file inside that directory named ssh.bat with the following contents:

@wsl ssh %*

If the WSL distribution you installed windows-fido-bridge in is not your default, be sure to pass the --distribution argument to wsl specifying the name of the appropriate distribution. Also be sure that you don't have the Microsoft-distributed OpenSSH client installed or that one may be used instead of the WSL one.

Use with Cygwin

windows-fido-bridge supports Cygwin on a best-effort basis; while the primary execution environment is intended to be WSL, it also happens to be reasonably easy to compile on Cygwin as well.

To compile in a Cygwin environment, ensure the latest stable versions of the following packages are installed:

• cmake
• gcc-g++
• git
• make

Then, run the standard installation steps as if you were compiling for WSL (ignore the apt commands, of course). The build system will detect that you're building inside Cygwin and adjust the default options accordingly. The default build artifact will be a library named cygwindowsfidobridge.dll, which is the file you should specify when telling SSH what SK middleware to use. For example:

# Generate a security key-backed SSH key:
SSH_SK_PROVIDER=cygwindowsfidobridge.dll ssh-keygen -t ecdsa-sk

# Use your security key-backed SSH key:
ssh -oSecurityKeyProvider=cygwindowsfidobridge.dll user@remote

All other functionality, e.g. changing the middleware's behavior via environment variables, works the same as it does in WSL.

Note that you cannot use artifacts targeting Cygwin with a non-Cygwin OpenSSH, and attempting to do so will almost certainly result in a crash when attempting to pass data back to OpenSSH.

References

• Web Authentication: An API for accessing Public Key Credentials, Level 1
  • The official W3C WebAuthn specification. Microsoft's API seems to be largely based directly on this document.
• U2F support in OpenSSH HEAD
  • Email by Damien Miller announcing the release of OpenSSH's U2F/FIDO support.