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up vote 3 down vote favorite

I would like to limit failure retries on my Fedora machine to 5. I think I can accomplish it with PAM. But was unable to to do this.

I have referred to this article to do this

http://www.puschitz.com/SecuringLinux.shtml

Please provide suggestions

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4 Answers

up vote 11 down vote accepted

You might be interested in fail2ban.

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3  
I second this. If you want to secure your box, you do not just want to limit loging retries. You want to block the attempting IP for a prolonged period of time. Fail2ban does this automatically and just plain rocks at it. Try it out. – wzzrd May 19 '10 at 10:34
2  
Even more.. it's not limited to ssh. Actually it's not limited at all! With this handy tool you can do the same for FTP, Apache, and whatever you want (read - whatever provides logs). – Andrejs Cainikovs May 19 '10 at 16:10
up vote 8 down vote

Simply modify your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file; add

MaxAuthTries 5

and restart sshd.

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but which one will have overrding effect? PAM or MaxAuthTries in sshd_config ? – nitins May 19 '10 at 10:26
I think the lowest comes first :) – wazoox May 20 '10 at 13:44
up vote 5 down vote

I use an iptables rule that limits SSH connections to no more than 10 per minute. After 10 connections (or attempts), new incoming connections from that IP are dropped, which is usually enough to make the would-be crackers go away.

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 10 --rttl --name SSH -j DROP

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I like the iptables approach. Mainly because after awhile denyhosts and similiar tools get huge databases which takes, in some cases, dire CPU cycles. iptables is much more efficient this way. In 150 days, denyhosts has taken 37 cpu hours on a machine with 7k plus entries in its database. – artifex May 19 '10 at 14:33
looks like this answer, in conjunction with serverfault.com/questions/143323/limiting-failed-ssh-logins/… would be pretty good – warren Jul 21 '10 at 13:42
up vote 4 down vote

Another dynamic connection blocker based on failed login attempts is DenyHosts. It functions similarly to fail2ban, but specifically targets ssh login attempts. The last time I set it up, I found it very easy to configure.

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+1 DenyHosts has worked for me too. – Shaji May 19 '10 at 14:45

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