doc/announcement.html



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<title>Announcing the Monkeysphere</title>
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<!-- This is a draft of a wider announcement for the Monkeysphere.
     dkg will probably post the final version in his blog at
     https://www.debian-administration.org/users/dkg/weblog

     Edits are welcome! -->

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<h1>Monkeysphere: an OpenPGP-based PKI for SSH</h1>

<p>Ever thought that there should be an automated way to handle ssh
keys?  Do you know the administrators of your servers, and wish that
SSH could verify new host keys from them automatically, based on your
personal connections to the web-of-trust?  Do you wish you could
revoke and/or rotate your old SSH authentication keys without having
to log into every single machine you have an account on?</p>

<p>Do you administer servers, and wish you could re-key them without
sowing massive confusion among your users (or worse, encouraging bad
security habits among them)?  Do you wish you could grant access to
your users by name, instead of by opaque string?  Do you wish you
could rapidly revoke access to a user (or compromised key) across a
group of machines by disabling authentication for that user?</p>

<p>A group of us have been working on a public key infrastructure for
SSH. <a href="http://web.monkeysphere.info">Monkeysphere</a> makes use
of the existing OpenPGP web-of-trust to fetch and cryptographically
validate (and revoke!) keys.  This works in both direction:
<code>authorized_keys</code> <em>and</em> <code>known_hosts</code> are
handled.  Monkeysphere gives users and admins tools to deal with SSH
keys by thinking about the people and machines to whom the keys
belong, instead of requiring humans to do tedious (and error-prone)
manual key verification.</p>

<p>We have <a href="http://web.monkeysphere.info/download">debian
packages available</a> which should install against lenny (for i386,
amd64, powerpc, and arm architectures at the moment), <a
href="https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/monkeysphere">a mailing
list</a>, and open ears for good questions, suggestions and
criticism.</p>

<p>If you have a chance to give it a try (<a
href="http://web.monkeysphere.info/getting-started-user/">as a
user</a> or <a
href="http://web.monkeysphere.info/getting-started-admin/">as an
admin</a>), it would be great to <a
href="https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/monkeysphere">get
feedback</a>.</p>

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