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JGit/New and Noteworthy/6.7
Contents
JGit
Features
SSH Connections support PKCS#11 Hardware Security Modules
The SSH transport org.eclipse.jgit.ssh.apache of JGit 6.7.0 supports using PKCS#11 Hardware Security Modules (HSM) for public-key authentication.
It uses Java's built-in mechanisms to access PKCS#11-compliant HSMs via the SunPKCS11 security provider.
This can be configured in the SSH configuration file ~/.ssh/config as follows:
Host git.acme.com Hostname ... User ... PKCS11Provider /absolute/path/to/pkcs11/shared/library
The "PKCS#11 shared library" is typically provided by the vendor of the HSM; it provides the standard PKCS#11 API to the device. If the path contains blanks, quote it with double quotes.
HSMs may have multiple "slots" containing different tokens. JGit by default uses keys from the first slot/token. To select a different slot, use a config like
# At the very top of the file: tell OpenSSH to ignore this option, which it doesn't know IgnoreUnknown PKCS11SlotListIndex ... Host git.acme.com Hostname ... User ... PKCS11Provider /absolute/path/to/pkcs11/shared/library PKCS11SlotListIndex <slot number>
Note that this is the slot index, not the slot ID. The index is just a number, the first slot has index 0, the next 1, and so on.
Some slots may contain multiple certificates or keys. JGit just tries all keys from a slot in the order they are delivered by the SunPKCS11 provider. To specify that a particular key should be used, export the public key to a file, say ~/.ssh/my_hsm_key.pub, in SSH format.
- (Please consult the documentation provided by the vendor of the HSM on how to export a public key. Once it exists as a PEM file, it can be converted to SSH format using ssh-keygen -f my_hsm_key.pem -m pkcs8 -i > ~/.ssh/my_hsm_key.pub.)
Then use IdentityFile, plus IdentitiesOnly to specify that only the keys listed via IdentityFile shall be used:
Host git.acme.com Hostname ... User ... PKCS11Provider /absolute/path/to/pkcs11/shared/library IdentityFile ~/.ssh/my_hsm_key IdentitiesOnly yes
Note that there is no ".pub" file extension for the IdentityFile, and this file without the .pub suffix need not (and usually will not) exist. But the corresponding ~/.ssh/my_hsm_key.pub should exist!
Other Features
- JGit has learned to read the git config file $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config, if it exists, in addition to the global git config file in the user's home directory.
Other Changes
The complete list of new features and bug fixes is available in the release notes.
Contributors
The following 15 developers worked on this release:
Anna Papitto, Antoine Musso, David Ostrovsky, Haamed Gheibi, Han-Wen Nienhuys, Ivan Frade, Jonathan Tan, Jörg Kubitz, Luca Milanesio, Martin Fick, Matthias Sohn, Nitzan Gur-Furman, Qin Shulei, Ronald Bhuleskar, Thomas Wolf