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 provides authentication agent functionality on Windows and Unix platforms. SSH Tectia Server supports agent forwarding on Unix platforms. Thus, the start point of the agent forwarding chain can be a Windows or Unix host, but all destination hosts must be Unix hosts. The hosts in the middle of the forwarding chain must have both the Secure Shell client and server components installed.

Figure 8.7. 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>