Disabling password login for certain users for SSH

Question

I added this to the bottom of the sshd_config file

Match User user
    PasswordAuthentication no

Then I restarted SSH, and when I went to go SSH into my server I got the error

Permission denied (publickey)

How do I make it so a specific user can login to the server without entering a password or needing a key?

Answer 1

SSH assumes that you are using some type of authentication, be it password, key auth, kerberos, etc. By setting PasswordAuthentication no, you're just telling your sshd that it should not allow that as a possible authentication method. It still needs some sort of authentication, though.

I suppose there would be a way to do this using PAM if you really, really, really wanted to disable all authentication, but this is a very, very, very ill-advised course of action.

Don't do it.

When set up correctly, key auth is just as transparent as using no password, and is much more secure.

Answer 2

You might want to have a look at rsh with a rhosts file. It's insecure, but so is ssh without authentication. I would recommend you set up passwordless ssh keys if you need to do something like this.