Intro

I stumbled across openssh-ldap-publickey while looking to setup SSH keys in LDAP and found the setup to be a breeze. The project provides a wrapper for OpenSSH to store public keys inside the OpenLDAP entry. Here I will document the steps I went through to get SSH key auth working with OpenLDAP.

LDAP SSH Steps

  1. First install some dependencies. Here are the Arch Linux package names and designated repos.

Update 09/22/17: For those on Arch Linux, I created an Arch PKGBUILD that can be used to install openssh-ldap-publickey and dependencies.

community/perl-net-ldap-server 0.43-3 [installed]
  Perl extension for LDAP server side protocol handling

aur/pear-net-ldap2 2.2.0-3 [installed] (1) (0.41)
  Object oriented interface for searching and manipulating LDAP-entries

aur/pear-net-ldap3 1.0.4-2 [installed] (1) (0.41)
  Object oriented interface for searching and manipulating LDAP-entries
  1. Load openssh-lpk-openldap.schema into OpenLDAP.

Inside sshd_config we have a couple of options

  1. Use authorized_keys and LDAP: AuthorizedKeysFile .ssh/authorized_keys

  2. Use only LDAP: AuthorizedKeysFile /dev/null

  3. Include these two lines 
    AuthorizedKeysCommand /usr/local/bin/openssh-ldap-publickey
AuthorizedKeysCommandUser nobody

LDAP SSH Users

A typical LDAP People record can now have a new objectClass ldapPublicKey and attribute sshPublicKey in which case a user’s public key can be attached to the sshPublicKey attribute.