Ssh – Deny SSH connection with message

ssh

I'd like to allow only certain hosts to connect to my server via SSH, and reject the rest with a friendly error message. Authorized users of the system will generally be non-technical, accessing this system via Filezilla.

I thought I could do this with TCP Wrappers, but when I enter the below into my hosts.deny, the client just gets the error message "ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host"

sshd : ALL \
  : twist /bin/echo "Sorry, but your host is not allowed to connect to this server." \
  : deny

I came across a script, SSH Twist, which seemed to address this problem, but I just see the same error on the client.

For what it's worth, I'm testing on RHEL 6.1 with OpenSSH 5.3p1.

Best Answer

SSH Twist looks like a bit of a hack, and I wouldn't bet on it working with all sshd versions — it makes an assumption about what it can send during session establishment that isn't necessarily true.

It's a little ugly, but you can do something like this in sshd_config:

Match Host allowedhost1
Match Host allowedhost2
# one for each host (or hostname pattern or address range) permitted
# no commands in them, just the match entries
# this just makes sure they don't fall into the following catch-all

Match Host *
    Banner /etc/ssh/refuse_msg
    DenyUsers *

Related Solutions

Ssh – How to automate SSH login with password

Don't use a password. Generate a passphrase-less SSH key and push it to your VM.

If you already have an SSH key, you can skip this step… Just hit Enter for the key and both passphrases:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/username/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/username/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/username/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

Copy your keys to the target server:

$ ssh-copy-id id@server
id@server's password:

Now try logging into the machine, with ssh 'id@server', and check-in:

.ssh/authorized_keys

Note: If you don't have .ssh dir and authorized_keys file, you need to create it first

to make sure we haven’t added extra keys that you weren’t expecting.

Finally, check to log in…

$ ssh id@server

id@server:~$

You may also want to look into using ssh-agent if you want to try keeping your keys protected with a passphrase.

SSH – Bad Owner or Permissions on ~/.ssh/config

I needed to have rw for user only permissions on config. This fixed it.

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config

As others have noted below, it could be the file owner. (upvote them!)

chown $USER ~/.ssh/config

If your whole folder has invalid permissions here's a table of possible permissions:

Path	Permission
.ssh directory (code)	0700 (drwx------)
private keys (ex: `id_rsa`) (code)	0600 (-rw-------)
`config`	0600 (-rw-------)
public keys (*.pub ex: `id_rsa.pub`)	0644 (-rw-r--r--)
`authorized_keys` (code)	0644 (-rw-r--r--)
`known_hosts`	0644 (-rw-r--r--)

Sources:

openssh check-perm.c
openssh readconf.c
openssh ssh_user_config fix_authorized_keys_perms

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ssh – How to automate SSH login with password

SSH – Bad Owner or Permissions on ~/.ssh/config

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