Securely file SSH periods on RHEL in a personal VPC community

On this weblog put up, you’ll discover ways to file SSH periods on a Purple Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) VSI in a personal VPC community utilizing in-built packages. The VPC personal community is provisioned by way of Terraform and the RHEL packages are put in utilizing Ansible automation. Moreover, you’ll discover ways to arrange a extremely obtainable bastion host.

What’s session recording and why is it required?

A bastion host and a soar server are each safety mechanisms utilized in community and server environments to manage and improve safety when connecting to distant techniques. They serve related functions however have some variations of their implementation and use circumstances. The bastion host is positioned in entrance of the personal community to take SSH requests from public site visitors and go the request to the downstream machine. Bastion host and soar servers are weak to intrusion as a result of they’re uncovered to public site visitors.

Session recording helps an administrator of a system to audit consumer SSH periods and ensure they adjust to regulatory necessities. Within the occasion of a safety breach, the administrator will need to audit and analyze the consumer periods. That is crucial for a security-sensitive system.

What’s a personal VPC community?

A digital personal cloud is totally personal if there isn’t a public ingress or outgress community site visitors. In easy technical phrases, it’s personal if there aren’t any public gateways on the subnets (personal subnets) and no floating IPs on the Digital Server Cases (VSIs).

How do I connect with the personal VPC community?

Consumer-to-site VPN for VPC is likely one of the two VPN choices obtainable on IBM Cloud, and it permits customers to hook up with IBM Cloud assets by way of safe, encrypted connections.

The client-to-site VPN is very obtainable, with two VPN servers which might be created in two totally different availability zones in the identical area. The bastions are extremely obtainable as effectively.

Stipulations

Provision the personal VPC community utilizing Terraform

• Upon getting the IBM Cloud Secrets and techniques Supervisor secret with the certificates, launch your terminal and set the next Terraform variables:

export TF_VAR_ibmcloud_api_key=<IBM_CLOUD_API_KEY>

export TF_VAR_secrets_manager_certificate_crn=<SECRET_CRN>

git clone https://github.com/VidyasagarMSC/private-vpc-network

cd terraform

• Run the Terraform instructions to provision the VPC assets (e.g., subnets, bastion hosts (VSIs), VPN, and many others.):

terraform init

terraform plan

terraform apply

Connect with client-to-site VPN

• As soon as the VPC assets are efficiently provisioned, you want to obtain the VPN consumer profile by navigating to VPN servers web page on IBM Cloud.
• Click on the Consumer-to-site servers tab after which on the identify of the VPN:

• Obtain the profile from the Purchasers tab.
• The VPN provisioned by way of Terraform makes use of certificates. Comply with the directions right here to hook up with the OpenVPN Consumer.
• It is best to see the profitable connection in your OpenVPN Consumer:

Confirm the SSH connection

• On a terminal, add the SSH personal key to the SSH agent with the next command:

ssh-add <LOCATION_OF_PRIVATE_SSH_KEY> 

• Instance: ssh-add ~/.ssh/<NAME_OF_THE_PRIVATE_KEY>
• Run the next command to SSH into the RHEL VSI by way of a bastion host. You can be utilizing the personal IP handle of the bastion in Zone 1:

ssh -J root@10.10.0.13 root@10.10.128.13

• Keep in mind, you ought to be related to the client-to-site VPN to entry the RHEL VSI by way of the bastion host.
• After SSH, It is best to see directions to allow SSH session recording utilizing the TLOG bundle on RHEL.

Deploy session recording utilizing Ansible

To deploy the session recording answer, you want to have the next packages put in on the RHEL VSI:

• tlog
• SSSD
• cockpit-session-recording

The packages will probably be put in by way of Ansible automation on all of the VSIs—each bastion hosts and RHEL VSI.

• Transfer to the Ansible folder:

cd ansible

• Create hosts.ini from the template file:

cp hosts_template.ini hosts.ini

• Run the Ansible playbook to put in the packages from an IBM Cloud personal mirror/repository:

ansible-playbook main_playbook.yml -i hosts.ini --flush-cache

You possibly can see in Determine 1 that after you SSH into the RHEL machine, you will note a word saying: ATTENTION! Your session is being recorded!

Verify the session recordings, logs and stories

When you intently observe the messages post-SSH, you will note a URL to the online console that may be accessed utilizing the machine identify or personal IP over port 9090. To permit site visitors on port 9090, within the Terraform code, change the worth of allow_port_9090 variable to true and run terraform apply. The most recent terraform apply will add ACL and safety group guidelines to permit site visitors on port 9090.

• Now, open a browser and navigate to http://10.10.128.13:9090. To entry utilizing the VSI identify, you want to arrange a personal DNS (out of scope for this text). You want a root password to entry the online console:

• Navigate to Session Recording on the left-hand facet to see the record of session recordings. Together with session recordings, you possibly can test the logs, diagnostic stories, and many others.:

Really helpful studying

Conclusion

This text coated why session recording is required in bastion hosts for auditing and compliance and the way session recording will be arrange with the built-in RHEL packages utilizing Ansible Automation.

Whereas designing a secured digital personal cloud community, you realized one of the best practices in architecting a VPC personal community. We additionally coated the necessity to construct extremely obtainable VPN servers and bastion hosts. With the provisioning of cloud infrastructure utilizing Terraform and Ansible for session recording, you bought hands-on expertise.

Study extra about IBM Cloud VPC

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