jaap-jan
211eba0666
A fingerprint approved once is now approved on every machine and survives a
restart, because host key trust is a vault item type rather than a dictionary
that dies with the process. InMemoryKnownHostStore was what shipped, so the user
was asked to verify a fingerprint on every single connection — which is the gap
most likely to train somebody to click through the one warning that actually
matters. A warning that appears when nothing is wrong teaches that nothing is
ever wrong.
The fourth item type, and like the third it cost no sync logic: a row, an EF
configuration, a migration, a server kind; a secret, a codec, a merge, a cipher,
a repository facade and a session property. One row in the client registry. The
reconciler, the mirror, the repository, the outbox and the pull filter were not
touched. SyncEntityType.KnownHostKey and AadResourceType.KnownHostKey were
already reserved, so neither the contract nor docs/crypto.md changed.
One item per (host, port, algorithm), because a server legitimately offers
several host keys and which one gets negotiated is not ours to predict. Pinning
per endpoint would make an algorithm change indistinguishable from an attack.
The label is derived rather than stored, which is the one place this type
departs from the other three. A user never names a pin — there is nothing to
name it after but the three fields it already has — and a stored label is a
second copy of data that can disagree with the first after a merge. Relabel
returns the secret unchanged, and says why.
The store answers the handshake without touching the disk. SshNetConnectionFactory
calls FindAsync from inside SSH.NET's synchronous HostKeyReceived event, over
.GetAwaiter().GetResult(), which cannot be avoided; doing SQLite I/O plus an AEAD
open per lookup there would put the handshake behind the cache. So decryption
happens in OpenAsync and RefreshAsync — on unlock and after each sync pass,
exactly where the host and key lists already reload — and FindAsync is a
dictionary read under a lock with no await inside it.
That snapshot is where the one real bug in this change lived. Install originally
merged the live pins over the freshly loaded snapshot, to protect a TrustAsync
that had landed while the read was in flight. It would also have resurrected
every pin the user had just forgotten, and stopped a withdrawal made on another
machine from ever taking effect — the store would have healed the deletion back
into existence on every refresh. Replacing wholesale and discarding the read
instead is correct because writes are the rare case: every write bumps a
generation counter, and a refresh whose stamp is stale throws itself away rather
than winning. Nothing found this but reading the method again; it is the kind of
mistake that passes every test written before it, because the test that catches
it is the one the bug tells you to write.
Forgetting is new, and persistence is what made it mandatory rather than
convenient. A mismatch is a hard refusal with no way to continue — deliberately,
and that stays — so pinning a key permanently is also a way to make a
legitimately rebuilt server permanently unreachable. Before this change the pin
died at exit and the problem solved itself; now it does not.
ForgetAsync drops every algorithm for an endpoint, and it is reachable from the
host editor rather than from the warning. Putting it on the mismatch banner would
have made it two clicks from "this may be an attack" to "connect anyway", which
is the affordance the hard refusal exists to deny. The banner already promised
the key could be removed in the host's settings; that promise is now true and
points at the button.
Trust recorded on another machine becomes visible at the next sync pass, not
immediately, and that is a decision rather than an oversight. The failure it
produces is a first-contact prompt for a host a colleague approved a minute ago:
answerable, and self-correcting on the next pass. The opposite trade — polling
the vault on the handshake thread to close a one-minute window — buys nothing
and costs the property above. The dangerous direction is not reachable at all: a
pin recorded here enters the snapshot as part of recording it, so a refresh can
never discard a local trust decision.
The server learns nothing, and this is the item type where the temptation was
real. A plaintext host column would let a known-hosts screen sort and page
without decrypting anything, and it would hand the operator the map of every
user's estate — assembled, as these things are, out of facts that are each
individually harmless. A host row concedes an address only when relay is
switched on and the database refuses to store one otherwise (ADR 0004); there is
no equivalent excuse here. The table has no column to put one in, and the EF
configuration says so where somebody adding it would be standing.
Two things about the migration in this commit are worth knowing, because both
came out of getting it wrong.
It was hand-written first, including its .Designer.cs, and that version is not
what is here. Verifying it turned up something that had been quietly assumed:
Migration_AppliedCleanly_WithNoPendingModelChanges does not check the model
snapshot. It asserts that migrations applied and that none are pending, which a
wrong snapshot satisfies perfectly — the snapshot only matters as the diff base
for the *next* migrations add, so an incorrect one passes the whole suite and
corrupts the following migration instead. The real check is to generate a
throwaway migration and confirm its Up and Down come out empty. They did, and
the generated designer was byte-identical to the transcribed one across all 1255
lines, so the hand-written work was in fact correct.
Then dotnet ef migrations remove --no-build deleted the wrong migration. With
--no-build the tool reads the previously compiled assembly rather than the files
on disk, and the probe had just changed which migration was last, so it removed
AddKnownHostKeyItem and reverted the snapshot. That turned out to leave exactly
the right diff base, so the migration here is EF's own output rather than a
transcription — a better outcome than the one that was interrupted, arrived at
by accident. Never pass --no-build to migrations remove.
Mutation tested, all three sabotages detected: dropping the algorithm from
KnownHostIdentity.For, merging instead of replacing in Install, and pointing
KnownHostKeyCipher at PortForward — which is what a cast from the wire enum's 10
would silently produce. Each is caught both by an assertion about the mechanism
and by a behavioural test that never mentions it; the resource-type sabotage is
caught by the table from d10a38d and nothing else, which is what that table is
for.
The end-to-end slice now approves the real sshd's host key through the vault,
pushes it, and reads it back on the second simulated machine — including a check
that the server learned no address, and that the second machine answers null for
an algorithm never offered.
845 tests green. Zero warnings, dotnet format clean.
Three things are deliberately not fixed. A tombstone queued over a create that
was never pushed is refused by the server as Invalid and parked; that is
pre-existing for all four item types, and the fix belongs in
VaultItemRepository.DeleteAsync rather than here. Deleting a host, or changing
its address, orphans its pins — both are correct as trust decisions, since a pin
describes an endpoint and not a bookmark, but nothing surfaces the leftovers.
And there is no interface listing pins at all: trust is created at the connect
prompt and withdrawn in the host editor. A known-hosts list is where the orphans
would become visible, and it wants the vault column rework first, for the same
reason the credential editor does.
DodoSSH
A self-hosted, team-oriented SSH client with an end-to-end encrypted vault.
Manage hosts, credentials and keys in a desktop app; sync them across your devices and share them with teammates through a server you run yourself. The server stores ciphertext and never holds a key — the operator cannot read the credentials it stores.
Status: early development. See the milestone plan for what exists today.
Why
Teams either scatter SSH credentials across individual ~/.ssh directories with no sharing
story, or pay per-seat for a hosted product that holds their infrastructure credentials.
DodoSSH keeps the convenience of a synced, shareable vault while remaining self-hostable and
zero-knowledge.
Architecture
| Component | Choice |
|---|---|
| Backend | ASP.NET Core on .NET 10, PostgreSQL + EF Core |
| Client | Avalonia (C#) for Windows/Linux/macOS; terminal pane is a WebView running xterm.js |
| Auth | OIDC, provider-agnostic (Entra ID, Keycloak, Auth0, Authentik) |
| Vault | End-to-end encrypted; X25519 + Ed25519 + XChaCha20-Poly1305, Argon2id unlock |
| Connections | Client-direct SSH by default, with an optional raw-TCP server relay |
Three consequences worth knowing before you read further:
- Revocation is not retroactive. A removed member keeps what they already downloaded. The real remediation is rotating the SSH credential, so offboarding is built around a rotation checklist rather than a button that implies more than it delivers.
- No session recording in relay mode. The relay forwards SSH ciphertext, so it cannot see commands. That is the cost of the relay not being able to read your traffic.
- Locking the vault does not close your shells. Lock closes the vault and zeroes every key it held; a session that authenticated before it keeps running, because the remote host never consulted the vault and the credential was already spent. That is deliberate — you lock when you walk away from the machine, which is exactly when a long upgrade or transfer is most likely to be in flight, and an idle auto-lock that killed it would be worse than the exposure it removed. The honest reading is that locked describes the vault and not this machine's access to your hosts. The unlock screen therefore shows how many shells are still connected, and quitting DodoSSH is what ends them.
The reasoning behind each major decision is recorded in docs/adr/, starting with
the E2EE trust model.
Repository layout
src/
DodoSSH.Contracts DTOs shared with the client — the real API contract
DodoSSH.Crypto DSH1 envelope, AAD derivation, the key hierarchy
DodoSSH.Domain entities and invariants, no EF
DodoSSH.Infrastructure DbContext, configurations, migrations
DodoSSH.Api the server
DodoSSH.Client.Auth OIDC code+PKCE on a loopback redirect, and the key binding
DodoSSH.Client.Api the typed server client, and client-side enrollment
DodoSSH.Client.Domain the decrypted item model and the three-way merge — no I/O at all
DodoSSH.Client.Storage the local cache: ciphertext mirror, outbox, offline unlock material
DodoSSH.Client.Sync the pull/apply/push loop and the conflict policy
DodoSSH.Client.Session where a profile lives, unlocking it, and getting one in the first place
DodoSSH.Client.Ssh connections, PTY shells, host key trust
DodoSSH.Client.Terminal the loopback data plane and credit-based flow control
DodoSSH.Client.App Avalonia; the only project that knows about a UI toolkit
tests/ one test project per source project
docs/adr/ architecture decision records
Everything under src/DodoSSH.Client.* except App is deliberately free of Avalonia. That is the
seam that lets the SSH layer, the terminal's flow control and the OIDC flow be tested without a UI
toolkit or a browser engine — which is most of why they are testable at all.
Building
Requires the .NET SDK pinned in global.json (10.0.x).
dotnet build DodoSSH.slnx
dotnet test DodoSSH.slnx
The tests need a Docker daemon. Everything that touches the database, the identity provider or an SSH server uses Testcontainers rather than a stub or a shared instance, so there is nothing to start first and nothing to clean up after — but with no daemon those suites fail rather than skip.
Running it
Four commands, in order. The first two are once per machine.
1. The development dependencies — PostgreSQL and Keycloak, with the dodossh realm imported:
docker compose -f deploy/docker-compose.dev.yml up -d
2. The schema. The API never migrates anything: it fails readiness while a migration is pending, and
says which one. dotnet-ef is pinned in .config/dotnet-tools.json, so run dotnet tool restore first if
you have not:
dotnet ef database update --project src/DodoSSH.Infrastructure
With nothing else configured this targets the compose stack above. Set DODOSSH_DESIGN_CONNECTION to point
it at another database.
3. The server:
dotnet run --project src/DodoSSH.Api
It listens on http://localhost:5233, serving /healthz/live, /healthz/ready and — in
Development — /openapi/v1.json.
4. The desktop client:
dotnet run --project src/DodoSSH.Client.App
In the app, enter http://localhost:5233 as the server. Your browser opens for sign-in — the realm ships
alice / alice — then choose a vault passphrase and write down the recovery code, which cannot be
skipped and cannot be recovered from the server. You can then add a host and open a shell on it. Keycloak's
admin console is at http://localhost:18080 (admin / admin).
You can also add an SSH key, which is stored in the vault like a host and synced the same way: paste the private key, then edit a host and pick that key from its key dropdown. From then on that host authenticates with it — on every machine, since the choice travels inside the host's encrypted payload — and its password box disappears.
The first time you connect to a host you are asked to check its key fingerprint. That decision is stored in the vault, so it is asked once per host rather than once per launch and it reaches your other machines with the next sync. If a server is legitimately rebuilt and offers a new key, the connection is refused outright with no way to continue from the warning — edit the host and choose Forget host key, which is deliberately somewhere you have to go on purpose.
Two of M1's known gaps are visible immediately, so they are worth expecting rather than diagnosing: password authentication asks for the password every time, because nothing in the interface can create a vault credential yet (they do sync — there is just no editor for one); and unlock asks for the passphrase on every launch, because no device key is registered.
End-to-end verification
One suite runs against a real server rather than a stub. It needs a Docker daemon and nothing else, so it is part of the ordinary test run:
dotnet test tests/DodoSSH.SystemTests
It brings up PostgreSQL, Keycloak and an OpenSSH server in containers, applies the committed migrations,
starts the API as a child process out of its own build output, and then drives the real client: sign in
through Keycloak, enroll, unlock, create an SSH key and a host bound to it, sync them, open a shell on the
sshd and approve its host key at the real first-contact refusal, then read all three back on a second
simulated machine and unlock again with no network. Roughly 25 seconds once the images are pulled.
What makes it worth its weight is that it consumes the artefacts that ship — the realm file from
deploy/keycloak, the EF migrations, the API's own appsettings — rather than a fixture written to match
them. On its first run it found a loopback redirect URI the realm registered in a form Keycloak rejects,
and a JSON configuration gap that made the whole sync surface unreachable from the real client while every
other test passed. Both are the same class of bug: two sides of a stub agreeing with each other about
something the specification never said.
The one value it cannot take from a committed file is Oidc:Authority, since the container's port is
assigned at start. Everything that authority points at is still the real realm.
Development and testing are currently Windows-only. Anything known or suspected to differ on
Linux and macOS is tracked in docs/platform-flags.md, along with the
deployment gotchas that have already cost time once. Read it before assuming something works
off-Windows.
Conventions the build enforces
- Warnings are errors.
dotnet format --verify-no-changesgates CI. - Package versions are centralised in
Directory.Packages.props;packages.lock.jsonis committed and CI restores in locked mode. BannedSymbols.txtbansDateTime.UtcNow(useTimeProvider),Guid.NewGuid(useCreateVersion7), sync-over-async, MD5/SHA1 and PBKDF2.- Public members of
DodoSSH.Contractsmust be declared inPublicAPI.Unshipped.txt, so a contract change is a build error rather than a client-side surprise.
Milestones
-
M0 — foundation. Repo structure, build conventions, CI, ADRs. Done.
-
M1 — vertical slice. OIDC login → enroll → create a host → open a shell. Server done: the DSH1 crypto core, the data model, sync push/pull for hosts,
/me, and enrollment with the identity-provider key binding. Client done: the key hierarchy, the OIDC flow with the key binding, SSH connections with host key trust, the terminal data plane, the encrypted local cache with the sync client — offline unlock, an outbox and a field-level three-way merge, conflict matrix green — and an Avalonia shell that is vault-backed: server URL → browser sign-in → enroll → unlock → host list → terminal. The shell's state machine is covered by tests against an in-memory server, so the states that matter most (the recovery code that cannot be skipped, the unlock that needs no network) are checked rather than remembered.Its layout is not covered by anything, and that gap has already cost a shipped defect: the setup and unlock screens were layered over the terminal's WebView, which on Windows is a native child window that cannot be covered, so they rendered sliced with their buttons unclickable. No test in this repository loads a
.axamlfile, and a headless one could not have caught this — there is no native window in headless, so it would have rendered perfectly and confirmed the wrong belief. Screens get looked at, or they are unverified. Verified end to end:tests/DodoSSH.SystemTestsdrives the whole slice against a real Keycloak, a real API, a real PostgreSQL and a realsshd— sign-in, the identity-provider key binding, enrollment, offline unlock, a host and an SSH key through the vault to a second machine, an interactive shell, and the host key approved at that shell's prompt reaching the second machine as well. See End-to-end verification.Known gaps in the client, stated rather than implied by the interface: nothing in the interface can create a vault credential yet, so password authentication still asks for the password each time — SSH keys are editable, and binding one to a host is the way to connect without typing anything; and no device key is registered, so the passphrase is needed on every launch until the OS keystore is wired.
Host key trust is in the vault, which is what makes trust-on-first-use worth having: a fingerprint approved on one machine is approved on all of them and survives a restart, and the server cannot drop a pin to force a fresh first-use decision without the item visibly going missing. A changed host key stays a hard refusal with no way past it; withdrawing a pin is a separate, deliberate act in the host's editor.
Binding a key introduced the first payload schema version bump, and it is worth knowing how it behaves: a host is written at the lowest schema version that can represent it, so only hosts that actually bind a key are written at version 2 and become read-only on an older build. Hosts that do not are still written at version 1, byte-identically to before the field existed — which is what keeps upgrading one machine from making a team's whole vault uneditable everywhere else.
-
M2 — full personal vault, robust sync, relay.
-
M3 — teams, sharing, ACLs.
-
M4 — hardening and ops, packaging, self-hosting guide.
-
M5 — multi-provider OIDC, key rotation, per-item content keys.
Licence
MIT.