CentOS Create User With No Password, Only Public Key Auth

Question

How can I create a user on CentOS 5.6, which cannot login with a password. I.E. they can only login and SSH using public key authentication.

 useradd myuser -d /their-home-dir

Will that do it, without calling passwd?

Answer 1

Yes, that will do it but you should add some keys to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys of course.

Answer 2

If you want to enforce only pubkey auth, then you need to modify your /etc/ssh/sshd_config , and set

PasswordAuthentication no