Tere — web-based shell sessions, securely

Tere is Estonian for hello. Terebra is Latin for a mechanism to bore holes in fortified walls. It's also a genus of sea snails with distinctive shells. Tere also happens to be an abbreviation of terminal emulator.

Tere is a radical rethinking of the terminal emulator + SSH ecosystem. As such, it's an experiment that might go nowhere; that's okay.

We aim to replace OpenSSH with HTTPS and WebAuthn. Those need to be made secure anyway, so this decreases what needs to be trusted. We aim to do this with Rust, without root, and using strong privilege separation and sandboxing.

Any web browser will work as a client. A command-line client can use the same protocol and codebase.

We aim to obsolete (at least) these technical limitations:

• SSH runs as root
• Session lifetime is bound to a single TCP connection.
• Passwords and "keys" are stored in files.
• Remote SSH hosts can fully control your local terminal, which is used also for other things. Avoiding this reduces the attack surface.
• Complete and uncontrolled delegation of authentication to remote host; SSH agent forwarding is fundamentally unable to let you see what you are allowing.

Current status

Just about nothing exists yet. Hold on.