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Enable SSH key login and disable password login

Pankaj

started a topic almost 2 years ago

I created a centos vps and since i created that on phone, I enabled password login and did not specify any ssh key.

Now I am trying to update the config in /etc/ssh/sshd_config to disable password login and enable key based login but the config changes are not getting reflected. I am not able to login with public key.

I added a user with sudo permission. for that user, I added the key in .ssh/authorized_keys file. but ssh user@ip always asks for password.

Can someone please suggest on this what I am doing wrong or is sshd config not updatable once vps is created?

J

Jose
said almost 2 years ago
To answer your question, once the VPS is created with password authentication only, if you want to manually allow key authentication, you may do so. We do not restrict this. As a suggestion I've included a helpful link and outlined some steps below:

I have successfully followed this guide to configure SSH key login:

https://www.liberiangeek.net/2014/07/enable-ssh-key-logon-disable-password-password-less-logon-centos/

The steps are:
1. Generate public key on client machine
```
ssh-keygen -t rsa
```
2. Copy public key from client (~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) to server machine (~/.ssh/authorized_keys):
```
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh root@Server_IP_Address "cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"
```
3. On server, edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config to enable key auth and disable password auth. Uncomment and modify below lines as shown:
```
PubkeyAuthentication yes
AuthorizedKeyFile  .ssh/authorized_keys
PasswordAuthentication no
ChallengeResponseAuthentication no
```
4. Reload SSHD on server:
```
service sshd reload
```

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