Viewing the Expiration Date of an SSH Certificate

A while ago, I set up my server with SSH certificates (following a guide like this one), and today, I began to wonder: “When do these things expire?”

Host certificate (option 1)

Among the output of ssh -v (my client is OpenSSH_9.3p1 Ubuntu-1ubuntu3) is this line about the host certificate:

debug1: Server host certificate: ssh-ed25519-cert-v01@openssh.com [...] valid from 2023-04-07T19:58:00 to 2024-04-05T19:59:44

That tells us the server host certificate expiration date, where it says “valid … to 2024-04-05.”  For our local host to continue trusting the server, without using ~/.ssh/known_hosts and the trust-on-first-use (TOFU) model, we must re-sign the server key and install the new signature before that date.

User certificate

I eventually learned that ssh-keygen -L -f id_25519-cert.pub will produce some lovely human-readable output, which includes a line:

Valid: from 2023-04-07T20:14:00 to 2023-05-12T20:15:56

Aha!  I seem to have signed the user for an additional month-ish beyond the host key’s signature.  I will be able to log into the server without my key listed in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys (on the server) until 2023-05-12.

This looks like a clever protection mechanism left by my past self.  As long as I log into my server at least once a month, I'll see an untrusted-host warning before my regular authentication system goes down.  (If that happened, I would probably have to use a recovery image and/or the VPS web console to restore service.)

Host certificate (option 2)

There’s an ssh-keyscan command, which offers a -c option to print certificates instead of keys.  It turns out that we can paste its output to get the certificate validity again.  (Lines shown with $ or > are input, after that prompt; the other lines, including #, are output.)

$ ssh-keyscan -c demo.example.org
# demo.example.org:22 SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_8.9p1
# demo.example.org:22 SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_8.9p1
ssh-ed25519-cert-v01@openssh.com AAAA[.....]mcwo=
# demo.example.org:22 SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_8.9p1

The ssh-ed25519-cert line is the one we need.  We can pass it to ssh-keygen with a filename of - to read standard input, then use the shell’s “heredoc” mechanism to provide the standard input:

$ ssh-keygen -L -f - <<EOF
> ssh-ed25519-cert-v01@openssh.com AAAA[.....]mcwo=
> EOF

Now we have the same information as before, but from the host certificate.  This includes the Valid: from 2023-04-07T19:58:00 to 2024-04-05T19:59:44 line again.

Tips for setting up certificates

Document what you did, and remember the passphrases for the CA keys! This is my second setup, and now I have scripts to do the commands with all of my previous choices.  They’re merely one-line shell scripts with the ssh-keygen command.  But they still effectively record everything like the server name list, identity, validity period, and so forth.

To sign keys for multiple users/servers, it may be convenient to add the CA key to an SSH agent.  Start a separate one to keep things extra clean, then specify the signing key slightly differently:

$ ssh-agent $SHELL
$ ssh-add user-ca
$ ssh-keygen -Us user-ca.pub ...
(repeat to sign other keys)
$ exit

Note the addition of -U (specifying the CA key is in an agent) and the use of the .pub suffix (the public half of the key) in the signing process.