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Is DigitalOcean's console access safe? Can I disable it?

Posted February 9, 2018 2.7k views
UbuntuSecurityDigitalOcean

After successfully setting up SSH Key Authentication and disabling password access to my server, I can still log in as either ‘newuser’ or root using DigitalOcean’s console access. Is this normal? It seems very risky.

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jattas
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jonleibowitz February 9, 2018

The console of your droplet is the virtual server equivalent of being directly attached to the server’s physical keyboard and monitor ports - it is not an SSH interface.

This tutorial describes its use:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-the-digitalocean-console-to-access-your-droplet

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shitchell March 22, 2019

I know this is over a year old, but I wanted to leave this here if you or some other future Googler finds it useful.

Someone recently-ish gained access to my saved passwords in Google and was thus able to access my DigitalOcean account, reset my root password, and login via the console.

As a result I decided to implement this: https://github.com/shitchell/response-test

It detects if the login session is coming from a physical TTY (which the online console appears to be), and if so, presents a customizable challenge phrase/response (glorified second password). If they get it wrong, they’re dropped into a pseudo shell that mimics /bin/sh but with broken commands so that it appears not that they’ve been locked out, but that the system is just horribly broken.

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