Report this

What is the reason for this report?

ssh refused: sshd[2444]: userauth_pubkey: key type ssh-dss not in PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes [preauth]

Posted on April 27, 2016

If you just upgraded Ubuntu 15.04/10 to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (or otherwise upgraded OpenSSH from v6.9 to v7.0 you may be getting the ssh refusal because of changes in OpenSSH.

I was specifically getting this error in the /var/log/auth.log (via Webmin): sshd[2444]: userauth_pubkey: key type ssh-dss not in PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes [preauth].

For this specific error, you need to add “PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-dss” (without the quotations) to the bottom of your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file.

See: https://superuser.com/questions/1016989/ssh-dsa-keys-no-longer-work-for-password-less-authentication?lq=1



This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Add a comment so I can heart it. Can’t heart “Questions”, which is what your comment shows up as. Good catch!

As explained in that StackExchange question, the security of ssh-dss is disputed and it would be a wiser idea to generate one of the supported key types, like ssh-rsa or ssh-ed25519, rather than going against the software defaults.

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Get started for free

Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*

*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.