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 and end points of the agent forwarding chain can be Windows or Unix hosts, but all hosts in the middle of the forwarding chain must be Unix hosts and must have both the Secure Shell client and server components installed.

Figure 8.7. Agent forwarding

Agent forwarding can be enabled in the client using either the GUI or the broker configuration file. The setting can be made both in the default settings and separately for each connection profile.

In the ssh-broker-config.xml file, agent forwarding is enabled by setting the following line either under default-settings or under a connection profile:

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

On Unix, agent forwarding is on by default. On Windows, agent forwarding is off by default.

For information on how to make the default agent forwarding settings in the GUI, see Defining Default Tunneling Settings; and for connection profile settings, see Defining Tunneling (SSH Tectia Client).