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Can both password authentication and an SSH key be used on the same account at Digital Ocean?

Posted on August 3, 2018

Ubuntu 16.04

DigitalOcean

By Pete Dixon

We have a user who has an issue using an SSH key and would prefer to keep using a username and password to log in.

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jarland

August 6, 2018

Accepted Answer

Hello friend!

Absolutely. You will need to make sure that “AllowRootLogin” is set to yes in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, then restart the SSH service if you had to change that. Be sure to work hard on that password, as merely existing with SSH accessible means as many as thousands of attempted logins by attackers every hour.

Kind Regards, Jarland

FRANCIS NDUNGU

August 21, 2018

The general answer is Yes. You can have both SSH key and password authentication on your Ubuntu server.

You will need to create SSH keys for each user and turn PasswordAuthentication to yes on your SSH configuration file:

$ sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Then:

$ PasswordAuthentication yes

Press **CTRL +X, Y **and Enter to save the file.

Then restart SSH using the command below:

$ sudo service ssh restart

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