Anyone who has an opinion on which method is the best to protect SSH, keypairs or the two factor authentication below?
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-protect-ssh-with-two-factor-authentication
To protecting houses we first had private keys and public keyholes. Then door codes. Then access cards combined with a code. I mean when I lose my key I also lose access to my server and someone else might get access instead. Even if I protect my private key with a password it’s easy to hack on someone’s computer if it gets lost. If I store a password on a server It’s not so easy to hack it if I have fail2ban and port knocking.
Keys always need to be stored somewhere, unencrypted discs, smartphones, dropbox etc. An easy-to-remember 18+ character password only need to be stored in a non-hackable brain. And combined with two factor authentication it seems to me safer then using key pairs.
If I use the Google Authenticator app in my phone I can still lose my phone/sim card. But if I also enable two-factor for a second phone I can always store that sim card in a safe place to always have access to my server, just in case I lose my phone. And if anyone get access to my phone they still need to know the ssh password.
Anyone who has an opinion on this?
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@sim thanks for the info on badips.com. Hopefully this’ll reduce the number of fail2ban emails I get on a daily basis.
We have both, normally we use keys and in case that it’s an emergency or the like, we can log in with 2FA. <br> <br>Additionally we have fail2ban and synchronize our block list over all our servers with badips.com. <br> <br>
2FA Works Great, make sure you backup your private keys in a safe place though incase you loose or break your phone. <br> <br>2factor is great because your phone can be offline and only you can access it if you have that phone or super long pin. <br> <br>What I dont like about keys is that they have to be stored on a computer and are hard to backup if you loose them. <br> <br>Johnathan Martin <br>fitbobcat.com