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Disabling Password Authentication with SSH on macOS Big Sur

I recently setup a Mastodon server on Digital Ocean. As part of the instructions you must disable password authentication via ssh on your server.

On Ubuntu 20.04 this required editing /etc/ssh/sshd_config, locating the entry PasswordAuthentication, uncommenting it if it was commented out, and setting the value to no. Then restarting ssh via

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systemctl restart ssh.service

Today, I wanted to disable password authentication on a mac server. It’s just about as easy but searching the internet for answers found many old answers that didn’t work. They were instructions for older version of macOS. I finally found instructions for newer versions (at least for Big Sur) . Here are the instructions I used that I found at this site.

Instead of editing sshd_config directly, you add a file in /ect/ssh/sshd_config.d with a .conf extension to that directory. In that file add the entries you want to customize. In addition to PasswordAuthentication you must add ChallengeResponseAuthentication and set them both to no:

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PasswordAuthentication no
ChallengeResponseAuthentication no

And that’s it. You don’t even need to restart the ssh server. The changes take effect immediately.

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.

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