SSH - what is the meaning of permission denied(publickey, password)? - ssh

sorry if the question may be vague or not but I noticed that whenever I have tried to login to a ssh server it usually says "permission denied(publickey, password" or "permission denied(publickey, password,x, y)" where x and y are other strings but do these indicate what I could use to login to the server or are these the requirements needed to login to the server?

It only lists the list of attempted authentication methods that failed at the initiation of the connection.
As described in this article from Marko Aleksic
One reason for the error may be sshd_config, the file that contains SSH server configuration.
The other possibility is that the authorized_keys file has insufficient permissions
if you have access to the server, stop the sshd service, and restart it manually in debug mode:
sudo /usr/sbin/sshd -d
That way, you will see exactly what is attempted and why it fails.

Related

first time out of many with ssh "permission denied (publickey)"

Forgive me, I know this has been asked so many times, and I read most of the answers. The difference between this question and other questions is that, in my case I did this procedure so many times. But this time is the first time in my life this is not working and I can't debug this.
I created a new ssh key in the client (windows 10), and added it to the authorized keys in the server (Ubuntu 20.04) through another authorized client (Ubuntu 20.04), restarted ssh, but I can't connect: it throws me the classic error "permission denied (public key)"
As I stated in the beginning, I did this so many times without any problem at all.
I don't know what I should do to fix it, everything looks ok..
UPDATE
I forgot to mention one important thing, using:
ssh -i ~/.ssh/private_key username#host
I can connect to the server without any problem.
I don't know why the simple ssh command is not working. I just have one key set up in the client.
Start the ssh-agent in the background.
$ eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
then
Add your SSH private key to the ssh-agent.
$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/private_key

pam_unix(sudo:auth): conversation failed, auth could not identify password for [username]

I'm using ansible to provision my Centos 7 produciton cluster. Unfortunately, execution of below command results with ansible Tiemout and Linux Pluggable Authentication Modules (pam) error conversation failed.
The same ansible command works well, executed against virtual lab mad out of vagrant boxes.
Ansible Command
$ ansible master_server -m yum -a 'name=vim state=installed' -b -K -u lukas -vvvv
123.123.123.123 | FAILED! => {
"msg": "Timeout (7s) waiting for privilege escalation prompt: \u001b[?1h\u001b=\r\r"
}
SSHd Log
# /var/log/secure
Aug 26 13:36:19 master_server sudo: pam_unix(sudo:auth): conversation failed
Aug 26 13:36:19 master_server sudo: pam_unix(sudo:auth): auth could not identify password for [lukas]
I've found the problem. It turned out to be PAM's auth module problem! Let me describe how I got to the solution.
Context:
I set up my machine for debugging - that is I had four terminal windows opened.
1st terminal (local machine): Here, I was executing ansible prduction_server -m yum -a 'name=vim state=installed' -b -K -u username
2nd terminal (production server): Here, I executed journalctl -f (system wide log).
3rd terminal (production server): Here, I executed tail -f /var/log/secure (log for sshd).
4th terminal (production server): Here, I was editing vi /etc/pam.d/sudo file.
Every time, I executed command from 1st terminal I got this errors:
# ansible error - on local machine
Timeout (7s) waiting for privilege escalation prompt error.
# sshd error - on remote machine
pam_unix(sudo:auth): conversation failed
pam_unix(sudo:auth): [username]
I showed my entire setup to my colleague, and he told me that the error had to do something with "PAM". Frankly, It was the first time that I've heard about PAM. So, I had to read this PAM Tutorial.
I figured out, that error relates to auth interface located in /etc/pam.d/sudo module. Diging over the internet, I stambled upon this pam_permit.so module with sufficient controll flag, that fixed my problem!
Solution
Basically, what I added was auth sufficient pam_permit.so line to /etc/pam.d/sudo file. Look at the example below.
$ cat /etc/pam.d/sudo
#%PAM-1.0
# Fixing ssh "auth could not identify password for [username]"
auth sufficient pam_permit.so
# Below is original config
auth include system-auth
account include system-auth
password include system-auth
session optional pam_keyinit.so revoke
session required pam_limits.so
session include system-auth
Conclusion:
I spent 4 days to arrive to this solution. I stumbled upon over a dozens solutions that did not worked for me, starting from "duplicated sudo password in ansible hosts/config file", "ldap specific configuration" to getting advice from always grumpy system admins!
Note:
Since, I'm not expert in PAM, I'm not aware if this fix affects other aspects of the system, so be cautious over blindly copy pasting this code! However, if you are expert on PAM please share with us alternative solutions or input. Thanks!
Assuming the lukas user is a local account, you should look at how the pam_unix.so module is declared in your system-auth pam file. But more information about the user account and pam configuration is necessary for a specific answer.
While adding auth sufficient pam_permit.so is enough to gain access. Using it in anything but the most insecure test environment would not be recommended. From the pam_permit man page:
pam_permit is a PAM module that always permit access. It does nothing
else.
So adding pam_permit.so as sufficient for authentication in this manner will completely bypass the security for all users.
Found myself in the same situation, tearing my hair out. In my case, hidden toward the end of the sudoers file, there was the line:
%sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
This undoes authorizations that come before it. If you're not using the sudo group then this line can safely be deleted.
I had this error since upgrading sudo to version 1.9.4 with pacman. I hadn't noticed that pacman had provided a new sudoers file.
I just needed to merge /etc/sudoers.pacnew.
See here for more details: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave
I know that this doesn't answer the original question (which pertains to a Centos system), but this is the top Google result for the error message, so I thought I'd leave my solution here in case anyone stumbles across this problem coming from an Arch Linux based operating system.
I got the same error when I tried to restart apache2 with sudo service apache2 restart
When logging into root I was able to see the real error lied with the configuration of apache2. Turned out I removed a site's SSL-Certificate files a few months ago but didn't disable the site in apache2. a2dissite did the trick.

Normal gitlab user with working keys cannot use PubkeyAuthentication to login to bash shell prompt

On an Ubuntu server, 'foo.com', that serves gitlab, a gitlab user, 'bar', can clone, push, and pull without having to use a password, with no problem (public key is set up on the gitlab server for user 'bar').
User 'bar' wants to use the command line on the server 'foo', and does ssh bar#foo.com. When user 'bar's ssh keys are not in 'foo''s authorized_keys, 'bar' is logged momentarily into Gitlab:
debug2: shell request accepted on channel 0
Welcome to GitLab, bar
and then that session promptly exits.
When user 'bar's ssh key - even one that is not registered with GitLab - is in 'foo.com''s authorized_keys, then that user gets the expected result when doing ssh bar#foo.com. However, then user bar (on their local computer) is unable to push, pull, clone, etc. from their gitlab-managed repository, with the error message being that "'some-group/some-project.git' does not appear to be a git repository".
It appears that there is a misconfiguration such that shell access is mixed up with gitlab project access.
How can user 'foo' be able to both login via ssh to a regular shell prompt and also use git normally (interacting with the remote git server from their local box)?
After a lot of searching I got to know why this was happening on my end. I had the same issue. I wanted to use the same SSH key for both SSH login as well as GitLab access.
I found this thread helpful:
https://gist.github.com/hanseartic/368a63933afb7c9f7e6b
In the authorized_keys file, the gitlab-shell enters specific commands to limit the access. It adds the limitation once the user enters the public key through web interface. It uses the command option to do so.
We would need to modify the command option to allow access to bash and remember to remove the option of no-pty if listed in the comma-separated section. For example in my case I had this within the line: no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-pty and had to remove no-pty from the list.
A sample modified command should look like this:
command="if [ -t 0 ]; then bash; else /home/ec2-user/gitlab_service/gitlab-shell/bin/gitlab-shell key-11; fi",no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding ssh-rsa AAA...
Need to be mindful to edit the correct command by checking the key number or the publickey and username associated with the command.
This did not require any service restart.

Cannot ssh into server except with google dev console ssh

I cannot ssh from my computer into the server hosted on Google Cloud.
I tried the normal ssh-keygen with user#domain.com and uploading the public key, which worked last time, but this time it didn't. The issue started after I changed the password for the account. After that I could no longer ssh or sftp into the account, although I wasn't disconnected until I disconnected.
I then tried the gcloud ssh user#instance and it ran fine and told me it just hasn't propagated yet.
I added AllowUsers user to the server's ssh config file and I restarted ssh on the server, but still the same result
Here's the error:
Permission denied (publickey).
ERROR: (gcloud.compute.ssh) [/usr/bin/ssh] exited with return code [255].
Update:
I've been working with Google tech support and this issue is still unresolvable. A file called authorized_keys permissions keep getting changed on boot to another user, who I also cannot log in as.
So I change it to:
thisUser:www-data 755
but on boot it changes it to:
otherUser:otherUser 600
There are a couple of things in order to fix this. You can take advantage of the metadata feature in GCE and add a startup script that would automatically change the permissions.
From the developers console, go to your Instance > Metadata and add a pair of Key/value
key : startup-script
value: chmod 755 /home/your_user/.ssh/authorized_keys OR chmod 755 ~/.ssh
after rebooting you should check the Serial Ouput option further down that page and see if it ran on startup. it should show you something along these lines :
startup script found in metadata.
startupscript: Running startup script /var/run/google.startup.script
Further information can be found HERE
Hope that helps!
I solved this by deleting the existing ssh key under Custom metadata in the VM settings. I then could login on ssh

Cygwin SSH public key auth UNC network path "not a directory"

I have a unique problem when accessing a Cygwin based SSH Server through public key (rsa) based authentication.
If I login to the server via password auth:
ssh Administrator#domain.com
I login just fine and can then either execute:
cd //anotherpc/shareName
or cd /backup/anotherpc where this is a symlink to the aforementioned network share
This is successful and I can access anything on that share without issue.
The problem arises if i do the same thing above just after logging in using a public key authentication mechanism.
The error output is:
cd //anotherpc/shareName
-bash: cd: //anotherpc/shareName: Not a directory
Update:
The /etc/sshd_config file has the following commands having removed all commented out lines:
Port 22
StrictModes no
AuthorizedKeysFile .ssh/authorized_keys
UsePrivilegeSeparation yes
Subsystem sftp /usr/sbin/sftp-server
It is extremely strange. Any help would be hugely appreciated!
Kind Regards
If you run this command before trying to access a network share, the required authentication token will be created.
net use '\machineName\shareName' /user:"DOMAIN\Username" password
For full details see:
See http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html#ntsec-setuid-overview