i want to remotely ssh to my home server, and I was wondering if I could just forward port 22 with disabling password login and use pubkey authentication will be safe enough?
i want to remotely ssh to my home server, and I was wondering if I could just forward port 22 with disabling password login and use pubkey authentication will be safe enough?
Disable password auth.
Enable key only auth.
Add in TOTP 2FA (google authenticator).
Randomize the port (reduce bots) that forwards to 22.
Configure lockout to block upon 3 failed attempts, for a long duration like 1 year. (Have a backup access on LAN).
Ensure only the highest encryption ciphers are accepted.
Ensure upgrades are applied to sshd at least monthly.
If you are going all out, may as well add hosts.deny and hosts.allow.
Add port knocking, if we go all out, let’s go all out!
Easy to do with known internal networks.
Difficult to manage when roaming.
Absolutely, just sometimes people forget those tools even exist. Of course, you can easily do the same thing with firewall rules as well.
Also, that was a great tidbit about the pam email notification on successful logon. I haven’t seen that one before, thank you!!
fail2ban
To help with identifying issues within your SSHd configuration, I recommend using ssh-audit: https://github.com/jtesta/ssh-audit
Good summaries. How does the TOTP 2FA article handle drop/reconnects? TOTP needed for each reconnect attempt?