Tuesday, December 21, 2010

ssh key validation

Well, the vacation wasn't as long as I feared. It looks like its back, albeit not full force, but I do feel like writing code again. I guess I just needed to take a break.

At work I support an e-commerce system for a major, world-wide bank. When clients are renewing their keys (SSH, PGP, SSL), they must meet certain criteria in order to be accepted and put into the clients setup(s).

One of the more recent criteria changes is the requirement that all keys be of length 2048 or greater. That's easy to verify with SSL and PGP keys, but what about SSH? The group that is verifying the keys does not have access to a system where openssl is installed and thus, is at a loss for SSH key validation. That is where my development bug kicked in again. I quickly whipped up a Perl script that validates the length of the ssh keys and tells them if they are acceptable or not.

After talking with my boss about how to get it to the group that does the official verifications, it was decided that he would try to get funding for a project (internally) to put it up on our intranet so the group can readily access and us it. Quite exciting for me really as I have not had any of my code hosted like that internally at this company and I am loving the idea.

I am just glad that I could so quickly produce a tool for my group to use for the verifications in the mean time. Happy Holidays, everyone!

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