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 and the Connection Broker can also serve OpenSSH clients as an authentication agent. 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 7.12. Agent forwarding

Agent forwarding can be enabled on the client side 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>

By default, agent forwarding is disabled (off).

On Windows, agent forwarding can be enabled in the SSH Tectia Configuration GUI, under Default Connection → Tunneling for the default connection, and under Connection Profiles → Tunneling per each profile. See Defining Default Tunneling Settings and Defining Tunneling.