rospo

README

Rospo

Rospo is a tool meant to create reliable ssh tunnels. It embeds an ssh server too if you want to reverse proxy a secured shell

It's meant to make ssh tunnels fun and understendable again

Table of Contents

1. Why Rospo?
2. Quick command line usage
3. Rospo UI
4. Scenarios
   • Example scenario: Windows WSL reverse shell
   • Example scenario: multiple complex tunnels
   • Example scenario: kubernetes service exporter
5. How to Install

Why Rospo

I wanted an easy to use and reliable ssh tunnel tool. The available alternatives don't fully satisfy me and don't support all the features I need (as the embedded sshd server for example, or an out of the box connection monitoring mechanism) so I wrote my own

Quick command line usage

Usage example:

Starts an embedded ssh server and reverse proxy the port to remote_server

$ rospo tun reverse -S -r :8888 user@server:port

Forwards the local 5000 port to the remote 6000 on the remote_server

$ rospo tun forward -l :5000 -r :6000 user@server:port

Get more detailed help on each command runnig

$ rospo tun forward --help
$ rospo tun reverse --help
$ rospo sshd --help

Use a config file

$ rospo config.yaml

Rospo UI

Rospo supports a cool ui too. The ui will let you handle tunnels and pipes configuration at runtime through the web interface. You can start/stop new tunnels and pipes at runtime.

Pipes and tunnels that are configured through the rospo config file will not be administrable from the ui.

Scenarios

Example scenario: Windows WSL reverse shell

Why use an embedded sshd server you might ask me. You have a Windows WSL instance that you want to access remotely without complicated setups on firewalls and other hassles and annoyances. With rospo you can do it in ONE simple step:

$ rospo run reverse -S remote_ssh_server

This command will run an embedded sshd server on your wsl instance and reverse proxy its port to the remote_ssh_server

The only assumption here is that you have access to remote_ssh_server using ssh keys. The command will open a socket (on port 2222 by default) into remote_ssh_server that you can use to log back to WSL using a standard ssh client with a command like:

$ ssh -p 2222 localhost

Example scenario: multiple complex tunnels

Rospo supports multiple tunnels on the same ssh connetion. To exploit the full power of rospo for more complex cases, you should/need to use a scenario config file. Let's define one. Create a file named config.yaml with the following contents

sshclient:
  server: myuser@remote_server_address
  identity: "~/.ssh/id_rsa"
  jump_hosts:
    - uri: anotheruser@jumphost_address
      identity: "~/.ssh/id_rsa"

tunnel:
  - remote: ":8000"
    local: ":8000"
    forward: yes
  - remote: ":9999"
    local: ":9999"
    forward: yes
  - remote: ":5000"
    local: ":5000"
    forward: no

Launch rospo using the config file instead of the cli parameters:

$ rospo config.yaml

What's happens here is that rospo will connect to remote_server_address through the jumphost_address server and will:

1. open a socket on the local machine listening on port 8000 that forwards all the traffic to the service listening on port 8000 on the remote_server_address machine
2. open a socket on the local machine listening on port 9999 that forwards all the traffic to the service listening on port 9999 on the remote_server_address machinev
3. open a socket on the remote machine listening on port 5000 that forwards all the traffic from remote machine to a local service (on the local machine) listening on port 5000

But these are just an examples. Rospo can do a lot more.

Tunnels are fully secured using standard ssh mechanisms. Rospo will generate server identity file on first run and uses standard authorized_keys and user known_hosts files.

Rospo tunnel are monitored and keeped up in the event of network issues.

Example scenario: kubernetes service exporter

Many times during development on k8s you need to port-forward some of the pods services for local development and/or tests. You need the port forward maybe because that services are not meant to be exposed through the internet or for whatever reason.

Rospo can come to the rescue here. You can create a rospo.conf like this:

sshclient:
  identity: "/etc/rospo/id_rsa"
  server: my-rospo-or-standard-sshd-server:2222
  known_hosts: "/etc/rospo/known_hosts"

tunnel:
  - remote: "0.0.0.0:9200"
    local: ":9200"
    forward: no
  - remote: "0.0.0.0:8080"
    local: ":8080"
    forward: no

pipe:
  - remote: "elasticsearch-master.mynamespace:9200"
    local: ":9200"
  - remote: "demo-app.mynamespace:8080"
    local: ":8080"

You need to create the keys accordingly and put them correctly on the target server. After that you can run a kubernetes pod that keeps up the tunnels and let you securely access the services from a machine inside your local network. Please refer to the example in ./hack/k8s for more details.

In this scenario the k8s pods act as a bridge between kubernetes services and the reverse tunnels. You are going to use pipes to copy the connections from the services to the rospo pod. The pipes in the example will open 2 sockets locally inside the pod:

1. a socket on local port 9200 for the elasticsearch-master.mynamespace:9200 service
2. a socket on local port 8080 for the demo-app.mynamespace:8080 service

Finally you are going to reverse forward the pod local ports to the desired host (my-rospo-or-standard-sshd-server:2222 in the example above)

How to Install

Rospo actually full supports *nix oses and Windows 10 Grab the latest binary release from here https://github.com/ferama/rospo/releases/latest

Alternatively you can use the docker ditribution where useful/needed. Look at an example on kubernetes here ./hack/k8s