SSH tunnel server container

This Docker container provides an SSH server for forwarding TCP/IP traffic. Interactive login and running commands of any kind are disabled.

Environment variables

Configure the Docker container using the following optional environment variables.

• SSH_CA: The contents of the SSH private key file to use as the certificate authority.
• SSH_PERMIT_OPEN: A whitespace-separated list of host:port destinations to which to allow port forwarding. See manpage.
• SSH_AUTHORIZED_KEYS: Client public keys to accept for authentication.

Example

1. If your client does not already have an SSH public then key pair, generate one by running this command, which will create the files ~/.ssh/id_rsa and ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub:

   $ ssh-keygen -q -N ""
   

   This command will save th

2. Generate an SSH key pair for the host certificate authority by running this command, which will create the files ca and ca.pub:

   $ ssh-keygen -q -N "" -f ca
   

3. Install the certificate authority public key in your SSH known hosts file:

   $ echo @cert-authority \* $(cat ca.pub) >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts
   

4. Run the container. In this example, we are only going to permit port forwarding to google.com:80. (In this example, we also map port 22 in the container to port 22 on the machine.)

   $ docker run --rm -it -p 127.0.0.1:2022:22/tcp \
       -e SSH_CA="$(cat ca)" \
       -e SSH_AUTHORIZED_KEYS="$(cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)" \
       -e SSH_PERMIT_OPEN=google.com:80 \
       ghcr.io/nasa-gcn/ssh-tunnel
   

5. Start an SSH connection to the container.

   $ ssh -p 2022 -NL 8080:google.com:80 tunnel@localhost
   

6. Connect to google.com:80 through the tunnel.

   $ echo GET / | nc localhost 8080 | head -n 1
   HTTP/1.0 200 OK