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ssh ppk auth and pam
Hi Guys! :)

I encountered something that kind of scared me a week or so ago. When I
would try to login to my server with a priv/pubkey authentication and
mis-typed the passphrase for my private key, it prompts for a password.
IIRC, I was able to login with my password from that prompt, even with
'PasswordAuthentication no' in sshd_config! After a little bit of reading
it looked like PAM was overriding the sshd_config settings, so I put
'UsePAM no', but couldn't even login with my priv/pubkey setup. So what
I've done is set 'ChallengeResponseAuthentication no' and 'UsePAM yes'.
This has resolved the prompting for password after incorrectly entering
passphrases 3-times, but is this the correct solution? Is there a security
risk in doing it this way?


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Re: ssh ppk auth and pam [ In reply to ]
Joey McCoy wrote:

> I encountered something that kind of scared me a week or so ago. When I
> would try to login to my server with a priv/pubkey authentication and
> mis-typed the passphrase for my private key, it prompts for a password.
> IIRC, I was able to login with my password from that prompt, even with
> 'PasswordAuthentication no' in sshd_config! After a little bit of reading
> it looked like PAM was overriding the sshd_config settings, so I put
> 'UsePAM no', but couldn't even login with my priv/pubkey setup. So what
> I've done is set 'ChallengeResponseAuthentication no' and 'UsePAM yes'.
> This has resolved the prompting for password after incorrectly entering
> passphrases 3-times, but is this the correct solution? Is there a security
> risk in doing it this way?

I use :

#UsePAM yes
#RSAAuthentication yes
#PubkeyAuthentication yes
PasswordAuthentication no

and my priv/pubkey setup works fine.

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Koon

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