Discussion
Sick of smug “well you should be using certificates*, not passwords” reply guys today. A proper password has plenty enough entropy to protect against brute forcing, so it comes down to whether the server has an auth bug in its password code or its certificate code, and I’ve seen both plenty of times.
* SSH keys are certificates.
@futzle With unforceable passwords (long, genuinely random) there is not much wrong with using them IMHO, except that a) on a cleartext link they can be snaffled and b) they can be shared/compromised. I'm a bit of a devotee of MFA for the last reason.
But if you actually care about and think about security, you are 9/10 of the way to being secure, (almost) regardless of what systems you use.
@kauer Cool, I buy these arguments. (And I am always aware of (a) and if (b) ever happens to my password manager then I’m toast even if if I use private keys.)
Seriously, someone Explain Like I'm A Sysadmin With 30 Years of Professional Computer Touching why a password is poor security, if the password:
- Is long
- Is generated by a password manager
- Is only used on one server
- That has a single job
- Which I will wipe and reinstall if it gets compromised
Every argument I've seen so far comes down to:
1. "If your server is already compromised, now they know your password." We can all see how by this point, a leaked password is not the problem, right?
2. "SSH keys are more convenient than copying and pasting passwords." Sure, they are, not that my question is about convenience, but the first thing I need to do on most servers I log into is `sudo -s` and now I'm back to passwords. (No, I do not give my unprivileged user blanket sudo-as-anything permissions.)