Native SSH server on LinageOS

I finally trashed my shitty Shift5.2 and got a spare OnePlus One from a good colleague.

tldr: scroll down to Setup of SSH on LineageOS.

I strongly discourage everyone from buying a ShiftPhone. The Phone was/is on Android patch level from 2017-03-05 – which is one and a half year ago! Not to mention that it was running an Android 5.1.1 in 2018… With soo many bugs and security issues, in my opinion this phone is a danger to the community! And nobody at Shift seemed to really care…

However, I now have a OnePlus One, which is supported by LineageOS - the successor of CyanogenMod. So, first action was installing LineageOS. Immediately followed by installing SU to get root access.

Next, I’d like to have SSH access to the phone. I did love the native SSH server on my Galaxy S2, which used to run CyanogenMod for 5+ years. Using the SSH access I was able to integrate it in my backup infrastructure and it was much easier to quickly copy stuff from the phone w/o a cable :)

The original webpage including a how-to for installing SSH on CyanogenMod has unfortunately vanished. There is a copy available from the WayBackMachine (thanks a lot guys!!). I still thought dumping an up-to-date step-wise instruction here may be a good idea :)

Setup of SSH on LineageOS

The setup of the native SSH server on LineageOS seems to be pretty similiar to the CyanogenMod version. First you need a shell on the phone, e.g. through adb, and become root (su). Then just follow the following three steps:

Create SSH daemon configuration

You do not need to create a configuration file from scratch, you can use /system/etc/ssh/sshd_config as a template. Just copy the configuration file to /data/ssh/sshd_config;

cp /system/etc/ssh/sshd_config /data/ssh/sshd_config

Just make sure you set the following things:

• PermitRootLogin without-password
• PubkeyAuthentication yes
• PermitEmptyPasswords no
• ChallengeResponseAuthentication no
• Subsystem sftp internal-sftp

Update: Ed Huott reported:

There was one additional step I needed to make it work. It was necessary to set StrictModes no in /data/ssh/sshd_config in order to keep sshd from failing to start due to bad file ownership/permissions on the /data/.ssh directory and files as well as the parent /data directory.

This is because the owner:group of /data is system:system which doesn’t match either root or shell owner:group used for /data/.ssh and its contents. I felt that setting StrictModes no was a better solution than messing with the owner:group of the /data directory!

Setup SSH keys

We’ll be using SSH-keys to authenticate to the phone. If you don’t know what SSH keys are, or how to create them, you may go to an article that I wrote in 2009 (!!) or use an online search engine.

First, we need to create /data/.ssh on the phone (note the .!) and give it to the shell user:

mkdir -p /data/.ssh
chmod 700 /data/.ssh
chown shell:shell /data/.ssh

Second, we need to store our public SSH key (probably stored in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub on your local machine) in /data/.ssh/authorized_keys on the phone. If that file exists, just append your public key into a new line. Afterwards, handover the authorized_keys file to the shell user:

chmod 600 /data/.ssh/authorized_keys
chown shell:shell /data/.ssh/authorized_keys

Create a start script

Last but not least, we need a script to start the SSH service. There is again a template available in /system/bin/start-ssh. Just copy the script to /data/local/userinit.d/:

mkdir /data/local/userinit.d/
cp /system/bin/start-ssh /data/local/userinit.d/99sshd
chmod 755 /data/local/userinit.d/99sshd

Finally, we just need to update the location of the sshd_config to /data/ssh/sshd_config in our newly created /data/local/userinit.d/99sshd script (in the template it points to /system/etc/ssh/sshd_config, there are 2 occurences: for running the daemon w/ and w/o debugging).

That’s it

You can now run /data/local/userinit.d/99sshd and the SSH server should be up and running :)

Earlier versions of Android/CyanogenMod auto-started the scripts stored in /data/local/userinit.d/ right after the boot, but this feature was removed with CM12.. Thus, at the moment it is not that easy to automatically start the SSH server with a reboot of your phone. But having the SSH daemon running all the time may also be a bad idea, in terms of security and battery…