hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4327.txt

Episode: 4327
Title: HPR4327: Chatting with Sgoti
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4327/hpr4327.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 23:07:55

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4327 for Tuesday the 4th of March 2025.
Today's show is entitled Chatting with Eskody.
It is hosted by some guy on the internet and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is Eskody talks about SSH and GitHub.
Let's have a chat, shall we?
I had a little problem working with GitHub using SSH.
It wasn't apparent at first what was going wrong.
I cloned Repo using HTTPS, then found out that GitHub is basically not doing anything
else with HTTPS, so you can't push or pull or authenticate from the command line anyways
with HTTPS, so it's just there for you to do it, get cloned, nothing else.
So obviously that sucks, I can't push pull, marginy, well, you can still do the local
margin and everything, but can't push or pull, got to use SSH, well that's cool, I'd
prefer SSH anyway, right?
That way I don't have to do the username, password, thing.
We got a public key infrastructure, which is much better, more secure, and I already know
how to use it, so let's do that.
So with SSH, I gendered up some basic ED25519 keys, and these are the keys that I use for
most of my own personal system, GitHub supports this, it's in the documentation, I also have
a link for that down in the show notes, they also support RSA, but there's some conditions,
again, show notes, everything's looking good, go ahead and cat that public key out, copy
it on over to GitHub, drop it in nice and easy, specify that this is going to be an authentication
key, Bob's your uncle, should work, right?
GitHub has a little test command that you can run, what they tell you to just SSH using
git as the user, git hub as the domain, I went ahead and plugged that into my SSH config,
that way I don't have to type the whole thing out, right?
You can just, you know, whatever short name you like, that's like the poor man's DNS,
SSH config, but it's so nice, and you drop down and that config, I pointed to an identity
file and off we went, in the test example that they point out, they don't mention eight
config, but, you know, I get the message that I need, which is you successfully authenticated,
but GitHub does not provide a command like interface or you've been logged out, all right?
So after being logged out that way, I went ahead and tried to do the push pull, you know,
everything that you need to do, would not work.
I tried a few more things, I figured maybe I didn't type my password incorrectly because
I do save a password onto my SSH keys, I recommend doing that, even if you don't do like
a full password, even a pen would be better than like absolutely nothing, but never mind,
you know, you do what you like, could not get authenticated, something, and maybe there's
something wrong with my key, I'm doing a research, I'm searching around, people are talking
about all these different things that are not my problem.
For instance, do you have the proper permissions on your key, which I use a Chomad equal 400?
So only the owner has read access to the keys, same thing with like the SSH directory,
you know what permissions you have on that, again, Chomad 700 there.
I immediately thought, okay, let me go ahead and pack a job, this issue, I want to basically
build a poor man's ticket and submit it to the community.
In my poor man's ticket, you know, I'm putting together all of the steps that I've taken
to build the keys, upload them everything.
That way the community understands that I know what I'm doing, and I've, you know, we
can get past the basic gotchas that come with the SSH, I head on over to the chat room,
drop my nice little package to report in there, and we can you know what the community
reacted.
They came back with some information, helping me out, you know, asking a couple of questions,
trying to go through the usual triage, we eventually bumped into that 24 hour mark.
So trying to put this issue to bed for today, we'll pick it back up tomorrow.
We get back into it the next day, and again, I'm testing it out, I'm trying to see if
it's my system, if there's some sort of config issue or whatever, I'll watch some more
YouTube videos, scour the web, most of the issues that they point out just aren't my
issue.
So I thought, okay, best way to figure this out, I got another system over here, and
this is a good time to stop and tell you guys a little bit about how, if you have any
of those other, you know, single board computers lying around.
For me, I got a laptop that's nearby, so I use that, but if you have one of those single
board computers, they're great for this kind of stuff, because on your main system, you
might be facing an issue that you can't solve, but you can set up a similar environment
onto that single board computer, especially if it has like four gigs or more, you know,
less than four gigs, well, you know, but what I did here is I set up my environment on
the other system, I have a fedora laptop over here, blank SSH config, gin, new keys, no
password, same key algorithm, ED255, yada yada, and I slowly started changing things, right,
so no password, and I was able to connect, and I thought, okay, so my laptop is able
to connect to GitHub, meaning I uploaded the key to GitHub, hub from the laptop, and then
attempted to push pull yada yada, you know, just to make sure that it works, it does.
GitHub reveals that I am sending and receiving data using that key, now the key is marked
not safe for work, that way I know not to keep it up there, right, you know to delete
that, not safe for work, while going through the config, I'm looking at my desktop, I'm
seeing the config on the desktop, I'm looking at the config on the laptop and line by line,
I'm just adding things from the desktop to the laptops config until I hit an issue, now
I'm going to have a sample of what my config looks like now, down in the show notes, but
the setting I bumped into, they caused all of this issue, right, like we're running
up on a 48 hour mark, and there's a setting I have down in my global settings in my SSH
config, it's called Identities Only, now I've been using this for years, I can't remember
why I selected it and put it into my config, but it's out of there now, that setting was
causing all of this trouble, and you know how whenever you're trying to find an issue,
and you're thinking it must be this super massive issue, especially in any kind of coding
or scripting, how it always turns out to be something like a missing semicolon, you know
something super small, you know, well here it turns out to be same thing, something super
small, so I figured you know I took that out now, and I was able to authenticate everything
is going through nice and smooth again, I thought okay, but now's a good time, let me go
ahead and clean up the config, I want to add a couple more things and test them out while
I'm at it, and this might make a good show, so from my preferred authentication setting,
I usually have that as just public key, but I also added keyboard interaction onto the
back end of that, almost like a just in case, but really it's going to be only public key,
I was just thinking about like that initial, you know when you first SSH into a new pie
or something like that, you know what I'm getting at, there's also the public, it's called
pub key authentication, I have that as yes, and then the third setting under, remember this
is on the global properties, and in order to enable a global property, what I've done
here, my config is at the very bottom of the config, I have host, and instead of typing
a host name, you just put the asterisk, and that means it will now apply to all hosts,
and who I added all that stuff down in there, just to beef up the config a little bit more,
make it look nice, clean it up, trim all the other stuff out of there, some of the old
service that I don't SSH into anymore, cleaning them out, also one of the things I want
to point out, which is really cool, I didn't know how to do this, but if you run SSH command
with the capital Q flag for the host key, for the host key algorithms, it'll give you
a list of all the support algorithms, so I'm going to hand copy that into my config
as well, but I comment them out, and they have to bottom down there below global, so I've
just got a sample of that down there in my, in my sample config, as you can see it, I ran
a grant across a YouTuber by the name of Lawrence Systems, he's got a nice little site with
some information on using Ubiqui with their SSH keys, now I've seen this in the past,
so I never bothered to try, today's different, I want to try, you know, with all this effort
to get my GitHub interaction centered around SSH, and it turned out to be some small setting,
I figure while I'm already dealing with this, let's beef things up a little bit more
right, so I've got Ubiqui's, let's use them with SSH, I've got the fifth series, Ubiqui's
with the near field communication, yada yada, I'll have links in the description, now
I'm already using my keys to log in and out of GitHub, which is so good, because I guess
they count as past keys, right, it's a device you can use as a past key, so you don't even
have to do user name of a past, where you could just go log in with a past key, and just
you know, enable your device, what do you call it, touch it, your device, and it'll log
you in so good, well, if you're doing anything with Ubiqui on Linux, you'll know, especially
if you're using a Ubiqui authentic error app as well, when you install that, you're going
to go out, you're going to have to go out and get lib502, but see, in Lore, in Lorentz,
I think that's his name, yeah, Lorentz systems, like the YouTuber, he points out that you're
going to need the lib502 slash dev version, right, so I'm going to hit and grab the slash
dev, I don't know if the regular will work, but I grab the dev just in case, right,
links are going to be in the show notes, pull that down, gend up some new keys, and you're
going to be using basically the exact same command, except for your type, instead of using
just the ED259, you're going to be using ED259-SK, the dash SK stands for security key,
and he explained it very well, all is doing is in your identity file, part of that file
is on your security key, and the other part is on the file on the computer, so you need
them both to, you know, create the full thing or whatever, so I want to hit now gend up
two new keys, one for both of my keys, I have a type 8, well, I have more than two Ubiqui's,
the two that I have right here that I'm talking about today, a type C and a type A, I went
in and gend up a key for each one, of course you've got to go ahead and test them immediately,
I'm definitely not going to wait, they have another problem, so we're testing them right
this second, everything worked nice and smooth, and now for my SSH keys, I no longer have
to put in the password for them, I could just use my Ubiqui, now I still have a pen
associated, but you know, that's just me, a pen is a lot easier, plus, you know, it's
just something you have, something you know, multi factor, and all of that built into
the PKI, so I feel very good about it, I'm happy, one of the other things I'm going to
point out here, as you can see in my sample, and I left it this way just to show you, I
have GitHub as two separate hosts, you know, with the exact same host name, so when I was
testing my first key, it worked, no problem, you know, key zero, key one, which is the
second key, it threw an error, because the config reads, you know, top down, so it tries
to do the first entry of GitHub, which uses key zero, which is not plugged in, therefore
it gives an error, then it reads the second entry of GitHub, which is key one, and then
it succeeds, what I was thinking about trying, which I'll do later, when I have the heart
for it, because right now, after all of the failure and everything, I don't have the heart
for it right now, I'm just in the future, I'm going to try just putting two identity files
under one profile, so it'll just be one GitHub, and it'll have two identity file, I don't
know, properties under it, I never done that before, and I don't know what kind of errors
it might throw, but that's, that's for future Scotty to find, to find out, one way or another,
from the command line, I can use Git, and interact with GitHub, which is what I wanted, I figured
a few of you hackers are out there, are going to want to know about this, if you've got
UB keys and you're not using them for your SSH keys, give it a try, you'll love it, I'm
telling you, no more passwords or anything like that, or if you're already not using passwords,
and you have a UB key, I mean, why not, and this is for your job, and you're going to
go through all these bunch of steps to get new keys, put in or whatever, yada, and who
I hope you guys enjoyed the episode, let me know what you think, or you're using UB keys
with your SSH keys, if not, why not, get you in the next one.
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