Dropbear Connect

A secure & efficient way to manage your remote connections with Dropbear!

DBC is a simple script to manage your SSH connections with Dropbear, which is an alternative to OpenSSH for remote connections.

Introduction

Dropbear does not have built-in support for an .ssh/config file, and even with OpenSSH, storing all your remote infrastructure in plain-text might not be a good idea.

If you want to compile it yourself, you can set #define DROPBEAR_USE_SSH_CONFIG 1 to enable support for the limited .ssh/dropbear-config. This is disabled by default & was only recently added.

Dropbear does not have support for encrypted SSH private keys, and even with OpenSSH, storing your private keys (even if encrypted) in the default .ssh directory might not be a good idea.

DBC is really simple & meant to run side-by-side with pass securely store your .ssh/config & your SSH private keys.

You can securely manage & organize your SSH connections now. Your SSH private key is temporarily decrypted in RAM & used to connect. Once connected, the key is wiped.

DBC Client Usage

1. Store your Dropbear configurations in your password store under the name dropbear in the following format:

NAME USER HOST PORT JUMP

JUMP is optional and can be used to specify a host that should use your jump host.

If JUMP is set to x, the script will use the jump host to connect to the end host.

There should only be one jump host in the config file and it should be named jump.

Example

jump    acidvegas 68.192.37.5   5902
hatebox acidvegas 100.151.45.10 2023 x
aws     admin     45.16.150.203 22

2. Store your Dropbear private key in your password store under the name dropbear_key.

3. Run the script with the name of the host you want to connect to:

./dbc hatebox

Useful Tips

• Run the daemon with: dropbear -p LOCAL_IP:RANDOM_PORT -w -t -T 1 -R -F (This will disable root logins & require both a password & key to connect)
• Git usage: git config core.sshCommand "dbclient -i ~/.ssh/key"
• Generate private key: dropbearkey -t ed25519 -f ~/.dropbear/key | grep "ssh-ed25519"
• Get public key: dropbearkey -y -f ~/.dropbear/key | head -n 2 | tail -n 1

Mirrors for this repository: acid.vegas • SuperNETs • GitHub • GitLab • Codeberg