SSH transport

[Havoc Pennington]

Hi,

Zeeshan Ali wrote:
> Hello guys!
>   Some of you probably already know about my itsy bitsy project
> called Gabriel (http://gabriel.sourceforge.net), which allows a dbus
> client to connect to a remote bus over SSH. I really would have liked
> to implement an SSH (libssh-based) transport for libdbus instead of
> writing gabriel but I wasn't sure wether dbus devels would like that
> or not. I asked on the irc channel a few times but nobody seemed
> enthusiastic about it so i started writing gabriel as an independent
> project.
> 
>  Anyways! I am still ready to write an SSH transport based on code
> from Gabriel if dbus devels are interesed. Waiting for your
> oppinions/suggestions/
> 

ssh forwarding for dbus is sorely needed; ideally working just like the 
X forwarding stuff I would say, to minimize confusion. I guess that 
requires patching openssh, though?

including an ssh transport in dbus would be almost as good except 
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS still has to be set manually on the remote 
machine. Still, I would think an optional (configure --enable-libssh) 
ssh transport is interesting if we assume we can't patch openssh.

You would ideally use ssh itself for authentication, rather than any 
existing dbus mechanism. This will require introducing a new dbus auth 
mechanism that might be like:
  client: assert that I have already authenticated via ssh
  server: confirmed

Havoc