Skip to content
anazmy edited this page May 8, 2017 · 13 revisions

  1. What Is Aker?
  2. What Problem Does Aker Solve?
  3. What Is The Flowchart Of Aker?

What Is Aker?

Today's security challenges requires a different approach to monitor whats going in your environment, whether your business require HIPPA or PCI-DSS Compliance or not, you still need to be aware of whats going in within your environment, Aker acts as a SSH gateway (a choke point) that records all users sessions, helping you to know details on who did what on your servers.

What Problem Does Aker Solve?

There are many published open-source approaches to record SSH sessions, but the problem is they all tried to adapt to the traditional SSH access pattern

This pattern lead to "SSH recording" solutions that tries to log user activity on the endpoints (Linux servers), and push the logs to a centralized logging server, but IMHO there is a problem in this approach, in most cases a subset of the users have root access on the Linux servers, hence they may have the ability to :

  • Manipulate the logging .
  • Route logged traffic to different server .
  • Stop logging all together .

Aker tries to address the SSH recording needs and challenges in a different way. By adding SSH gateways to guard your environment as a central location to capture, maintain and audit your SSH sessions .

You get the idea, right ?

Users on Aker SSH gateway have no super root powers nor a bash shell, instead they get an intuitive text based window, listing the servers they are allowed to access .

With ongoing development of Aker we will try to make it as friction-less as it can be.

What Is The Flowchart Of Aker?

Aker - so far - has a simple flowchart, the authentication and authorization part is relayed securely to the Identity provider. Right now the work is ongoing to integrate with another awesome open-source project, FreeIPA .