Posts tagged SSH

Connecting to legacy servers with OpenSSH

Phasing out legacy cryptographic algorithms can always be an interesting endeavor as terminating too early breaks stuff and too late can lead to a compromise. OpenSSH disabled Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) with version 7.0 in March 2015 as 5 years earlier it was discovered that DSA was compromised and labeled as insecure. Normally this shouldn’t be a problem with a normal software life cycle, but sometimes you will encounter a legacy box that will not be upgraded as it will break things. Now it will stop new connections from being set up from being upgraded to machines as with SSH.

For an incidental connection from the command line, the algorithm can be enabled again to connect with a legacy machine.

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Using explicit SSH authentication methods

For many Secure Shell (SSH) is a magic sauce to get access to a server and transfer files between servers. But when things go wrong this magic sauce becomes a problem. Let’s start with one example of when things go wrong and how to debug them. First, we start add to option -v to our command to connect to another server to get some basic debug information about the SSH handshake and get to the point the user has to authenticate.

Just before the SSH client prompts for the user’s password two interesting debug lines are shown. The first line is about the authentication methods we can use and the next line shows our client selected method password as we don’t have any methods configured in our SSH client like public key. So we manually disable publickey authentication and set the preferred authentication methods to keyboard-interactive.

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