Agent forwarding is a special case of remote tunneling. In agent forwarding, Secure Shell connections and public-key authentication data are forwarded from one server to another without the user having to authenticate separately for each server. Authentication data does not have to be stored on any other machine than the local machine, and authentication passphrases or private keys never go over the network.

SSH Tectia Client and Server support agent forwarding on Unix platforms. The servers in the middle of the forwarding chain must have also a Secure Shell client component installed.

Figure 8.5. Agent forwarding

Agent forwarding needs to be enabled in the client by setting the following line in the ssh-broker-config.xml file:

<forwards>
  <forward type="agent" state="on" />
</forwards>