Comment by Wowfunhappy
6 months ago
Why is it better to have a nopassword admin account when using a machine remotely? The point of SSH is to resist mitm attacks, right? If someone could watch my keystrokes, I think I'd have bigger problems!
6 months ago
Why is it better to have a nopassword admin account when using a machine remotely? The point of SSH is to resist mitm attacks, right? If someone could watch my keystrokes, I think I'd have bigger problems!
This resists scenarios where the machine you are running SSH from is compromised, and has a keylogger or something similar installed. SSH can't protect you from a local attacker (in fact, the SSH client binary itself could be the compromised part).
Yes, but if the server you’re logging into only accepts keys then leaking its password isn’t nearly as bad. Though I guess if your local ssh client is compromised then your local private keys are also compromised so you’d be screwed anyway (unless you are using a yubikey type of thing—I should get me one of those).
If I own both machines this doesn't seem entirely reasonable. (Of course a machine I own could be compromised but again, then I have other problems.)