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.

Tectia Client provides authentication agent functionality and the Connection Broker can also serve OpenSSH clients as an authentication agent. 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 6.7. Agent forwarding

In the factory settings, agent forwarding is enabled (on).

Agent forwarding can be enabled or disabled on the client side both in the default configuration settings and separately for each connection profile.

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

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

Agent forwarding can be disabled in the Tectia Connections 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.