SSH Keys in Cloudera Director

SSH is a protocol for communicating over an encrypted channel between computers. A common use of SSH is to connect to a remote computer in order to establish a shell process, within which commands may be issued. The SSH client logs in to the SSH server and receives a shell prompt. The client can issue shell commands, and then terminate the connection or log out when finished.

SSH uses the same kind of strong encryption that is used by TLS and SSL for encrypted web traffic. An observer should not be able to determine the contents of the network traffic between the client and the server. Through encryption, SSH provides confidentiality of communications.

When establishing an SSH connection for shell use, a client needs to authenticate to a server. Authentication can be performed in a few ways. One common way is through a username and password pair. While this is a well understood and widely supported means of authentication, it is vulnerable to the use of weak passwords.

A better option is to use a key pair. Like key pairs in TLS and SSL, an SSH key pair is composed of a private key and a corresponding public key. When the server is configured with the public key, the client can authenticate using the private key. Due to the way that the authentication mechanism works, the private key does not need to be passed over the network. Also, a private key is much larger, and much harder to guess, than a password. For these reasons, SSH key authentication is almost always preferred over password authentication.

When a cloud provider creates a new instance, and you want to be able to connect to it over SSH, you must somehow inform the provider about the public key for authentication. The cloud provider is responsible for installing the public key in the correct location for it to work for authenticating with the corresponding private key.

The way that you tell a cloud provider about a key pair varies. For example, in AWS, you set up an EC2 key pair, which has an associated name. You can either have AWS generate the key pair and send you the data, or generate the key pair yourself and only upload the public key. No matter the provider, when you create an instance, you include information about the key pair.

ssh -i /path/to/private_key.pem username@instance_ip_address

Cloudera Director uses SSH to issue commands to instances that it launches and configures as part of bootstrapping deployments and clusters. Therefore, Cloudera Director requires the private key used to authenticate to the standard login account of each instance that it launches. It is insufficient for it to only be supplied the public key or an identifier for the private key material; only the private key itself is sufficient for authentication to succeed.

When you create a new environment in Cloudera Director, you supply the default username for a standard login account and the default SSH private key for authentication to that account. Every instance that Cloudera Director launches under the environment is accessed, by default, using the username and private key. An instance template, which specifies instance features like size and backing image, may override the username.

The private key must be provided to Cloudera Director in unencrypted form. However, Cloudera Director encrypts its own database where it stores private keys.