How to restrict SSH users to a predefined set of commands after login?

You can also restrict keys to permissible commands (in the authorized_keys file).

I.e. the user would not log in via ssh and then have a restricted set of commands but rather would only be allowed to execute those commands via ssh (e.g. "ssh somehost bin/showlogfile")

What you are looking for is called Restricted Shell. Bash provides such a mode in which users can only execute commands present in their home directories (and they cannot move to other directories), which might be good enough for you.

I've found this thread to be very illustrative, if a bit dated.

You should acquire `rssh', the restricted shell

You can follow the restriction guides mentioned above, they're all rather self-explanatory, and simple to follow. Understand the terms `chroot jail', and how to effectively implement sshd/terminal configurations, and so on.

Being as most of your users access your terminals via sshd, you should also probably look into sshd_conifg, the SSH daemon configuration file, to apply certain restrictions via SSH. Be careful, however. Understand properly what you try to implement, for the ramifications of incorrect configurations are probably rather dire.

GNU Rush may be the most flexible and secure way to accomplish this:

GNU Rush is a Restricted User Shell, designed for sites that provide limited remote access to their resources, such as svn or git repositories, scp, or the like. Using a sophisticated configuration file, GNU Rush gives you complete control over the command lines that users execute, as well as over the usage of system resources, such as virtual memory, CPU time, etc.

You might want to look at setting up a jail.

[Disclosure: I wrote sshdo which is described below]

If you want the login to be interactive then setting up a restricted shell is probably the right answer. But if there is an actual set of commands that you want to allow (and nothing else) and it's ok for these commands to be executed individually via ssh (e.g. ssh user@host cmd arg blah blah), then a generic command whitelisting control for ssh might be what you need. This is useful when the commands are scripted somehow at the client end and doesn't require the user to actually type in the ssh command.

There's a program called sshdo for doing this. It controls which commands may be executed via incoming ssh connections. It's available for download at:

http://raf.org/sshdo/ (read manual pages here) https://github.com/raforg/sshdo/

It has a training mode to allow all commands that are attempted, and a --learn option to produce the configuration needed to allow learned commands permanently. Then training mode can be turned off and any other commands will not be executed.

It also has an --unlearn option to stop allowing commands that are no longer in use so as to maintain strict least privilege as requirements change over time.

It is very fussy about what it allows. It won't allow a command with any arguments. Only complete shell commands can be allowed.

But it does support simple patterns to represent similar commands that vary only in the digits that appear on the command line (e.g. sequence numbers or date/time stamps).

It's like a firewall or whitelisting control for ssh commands.

And it supports different commands being allowed for different users.

Another way of looking at this is using POSIX ACLs, it needs to be supported by your file system, however you can have fine-grained tuning of all commands in linux the same way you have the same control on Windows (just without the nicer UI). link

Another thing to look into is PolicyKit.

You'll have to do quite a bit of googling to get everything working as this is definitely not a strength of Linux at the moment.