SSH passwordless login WITHOUT public keys

I was recently in a situation where I needed SSH & rsync over SSH be to able to log into a remote site without prompting for a password (as it was being called from within a script and would have been non-trivial to make the script pass in a password, especially as OpenBSD-SSH does not provide a trivial mechanism for scripts to pass in passwords - see below).

Normally in this situation one would generate a public / private keypair and use that to log in without a prompt, either by leaving the private key unencrypted (ie, not protected by a passphrase), or by loading the private key into an SSH agent prior to attempting to log in (e.g. with ssh-add).

Unfortunately the server in question did not respect my ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file, so public key authentication was not an option (boo).


Well, it turns out that you can pre-authenticate SSH sessions such that an already open session is used to authenticate new sessions (actually, new sessions are basically tunnelled over the existing connection).

The option in question needs a couple of things set up to work, and it isn't obviously documented as a way to allow passwordless authentication - I had read the man page multiple times and hadn't realised what it could do until Mikey at work pointed it out to me.

To get this to work you first need to create (or modify) your ~/.ssh/config as follows:

Host *
  ControlPath ~/.ssh/master_%h_%p_%r

Now, manually connect to the host with the -M flag to ssh and enter your password as normal:

ssh -M user@host

Now, as long as you leave that connection open, further normal connections (without the -M flag) will use that connection instead of creating their own one, and will not require authentication.


Edit:
Note that you may instead edit your ~/.ssh/config as follows to have SSH always create and use Master connections automatically without having to specify -M. However, some people like to manually specify when to use shared connections so that the bandwidth between the low latency interactive sessions and high throughput upload/download sessions doesn't mix as that can have a huge impact on the interactive session.

Host *
  ControlPath ~/.ssh/master_%h_%p_%r
  ControlMaster auto

Alternate method, possibly useful for scripting

Another method I was looking at using was specifying a program to return the password in the SSH_ASKPASS environment variable. Unfortunately, this environment variable is only used in some rare circumstances (namely, when no tty is present, such as when a GUI program calls SSH or rsync), and would not normally be used when running SSH from a terminal (or in the script as I was doing).

Once I found out about the -M option I stopped pursuing this line of thinking, but it may be useful in a script if the above pre-authentication method is not practical (perhaps for unattended machines).

To make SSH respect the SSH_ASKPASS environment variable when running from a terminal, I wrote a small LD_PRELOAD library libnotty.so that intercepts calls to open("/dev/tty") and causes them to fail.

If anyone is interested, the code for this is in my junk repository (libnotty.so & notty.sh). You will also need a small script that echos the password (I hope it goes without saying that you should check the permissions on it) and point the SSH_ASKPASS environment variable to it.

https://github.com/DarkStarSword/junk