Creating multiple SFTP users for one account
- by Tom Marthenal
I'm in the process of migrating an aging shared-hosting system to more modern technologies. Right now, plain old insecure FTP is the only way for customers to access their files.
I plan on replacing this with SFTP, but I need a way to create multiple SFTP users that correspond to one UNIX account. A customer has one account on the machine (e.g. customer) with a home directory like /home/customer/.
Our clients are used to being able to create an arbitrary number of FTP accounts for their domains (to give out to different people). We need the same capability with SFTP.
My first thought is to use SSH keys and just add each new "user" to authorized_keys, but this is confusing for our customers, many of whom are not technically-inclined and would prefer to stick with passwords.
SSH is not an issue, only SFTP is available. How can we create multiple SFTP accounts (customer, customer_developer1, customer_developer2, etc.) that all function as equivalents and don't interfere with file permissions (ideally, all files should retain customer as their owner)?
My initial thought was some kind of PAM module, but I don't have a clear idea of how to accomplish this within our constraints. We are open to using an alternative SSH daemon if OpenSSH isn't suitable for our situation; again, it needs to support only SFTP and not SSH.
Currently our SSH configuration has this appended to it in order to jail the users in their own directories:
# all customers have group 'customer'
Match group customer
ChrootDirectory /home/%u # jail in home directories
AllowTcpForwarding no
X11Forwarding no
ForceCommand internal-sftp # force SFTP
PasswordAuthentication yes # for non-customer accounts we use keys instead
Our servers are running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
