SSH for a group of users ?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,
Can any one tell me is it possible to setup private key public key pairing(SSH ) for a group of users , instead of setting it up for individual users ?

Eg:
Say i have 3 users A,B and C and i want the users to connect to SERVER1. instead of generating public private keys for each user , is there any method in which i can make these users in a group and set key pairing for that particular group ? and connect to SERVER1 ?

2

I think the answer is No, because it will spoil to some extent the idea of being private. I will be, however, happy to see other opinions.

3

Afaik no. You could use a "technical" user, which does that stuff for all the users in that group, but that would involve some mechanism to get around, but that depends on how personal the data has to be after the transfer etc.

4

A couple options.

If you don't mind the users potentially impersonating one another and snooping on one another's communications, you can set everybody's id to be the same. Not very extensible, that.

I'd be tempted to do it with sudo. Allow them to sudo ssh to the host in question, then just provide an alternate .ssh/id_rsa. Clean, highly "loggable", and if you set up your sudo line correctly, nobody can impersonate anybody else or read their data as it moves across the network.