1 This is Dropbear, a smallish SSH server and client.
2 https://matt.ucc.asn.au/dropbear/dropbear.html
4 INSTALL has compilation instructions.
6 MULTI has instructions on making a multi-purpose binary (ie a single binary
7 which performs multiple tasks, to save disk space)
9 SMALL has some tips on creating small binaries.
11 See TODO for a few of the things I know need looking at, and please contact
12 me if you have any questions/bugs found/features/ideas/comments etc :)
18 In the absence of detailed documentation, some notes follow:
19 ============================================================================
21 Server public key auth:
23 You can use ~/.ssh/authorized_keys in the same way as with OpenSSH, just put
24 the key entries in that file. They should be of the form:
26 ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEAwVa6M6cGVmUcLl2cFzkxEoJd06Ub4bVDsYrWvXhvUV+ZAM9uGuewZBDoAqNKJxoIn0Hyd0Nk/yU99UVv6NWV/5YSHtnf35LKds56j7cuzoQpFIdjNwdxAN0PCET/MG8qyskG/2IE2DPNIaJ3Wy+Ws4IZEgdJgPlTYUBWWtCWOGc= someone@hostname
28 You must make sure that ~/.ssh, and the key file, are only writable by the
29 user. Beware of editors that split the key into multiple lines.
31 Dropbear supports some options for authorized_keys entries, see the manpage.
33 ============================================================================
35 Client public key auth:
37 Dropbear can do public key auth as a client, but you will have to convert
38 OpenSSH style keys to Dropbear format, or use dropbearkey to create them.
40 If you have an OpenSSH-style private key ~/.ssh/id_rsa, you need to do:
42 dropbearconvert openssh dropbear ~/.ssh/id_rsa ~/.ssh/id_rsa.db
43 dbclient -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.db <hostname>
45 Dropbear does not support encrypted hostkeys though can connect to ssh-agent.
47 ============================================================================
49 If you want to get the public-key portion of a Dropbear private key, look at
50 dropbearkey's '-y' option.
52 ============================================================================
54 To run the server, you need to server keys, this is one-off:
55 ./dropbearkey -t rsa -f dropbear_rsa_host_key
56 ./dropbearkey -t dss -f dropbear_dss_host_key
57 ./dropbearkey -t ecdsa -f dropbear_ecdsa_host_key
59 or alternatively convert OpenSSH keys to Dropbear:
60 ./dropbearconvert openssh dropbear /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key dropbear_dss_host_key
62 You can also get Dropbear to create keys when the first connection is made -
63 this is preferable to generating keys when the system boots. Make sure
64 /etc/dropbear/ exists and then pass '-R' to the dropbear server.
66 ============================================================================
68 If the server is run as non-root, you most likely won't be able to allocate a
69 pty, and you cannot login as any user other than that running the daemon
70 (obviously). Shadow passwords will also be unusable as non-root.
72 ============================================================================
74 The Dropbear distribution includes a standalone version of OpenSSH's scp
75 program. You can compile it with "make scp", you may want to change the path
76 of the ssh binary, specified by _PATH_SSH_PROGRAM in options.h . By default
77 the progress meter isn't compiled in to save space, you can enable it by
78 adding 'SCPPROGRESS=1' to the make commandline.