Comment by dspillett
2 days ago
We have clients (regulated banks and insurers of various sizes) that send us feeds via SFTP. You might be surprised what proportion of them ignore our “we strongly recommend key based authentication” and ask for password auth instead.
When I set up a client sftp drop I had the luxury of saying "key based access only"
Then it was a surprisingly customer service intensive process to get the keys from the customers. I never did manage to automate it fully. Weird enterprise systems I have never heard of with strange key formats. ssh1 keys, email mangling them. Their internal processes requiring a password.
And way to many "I am sorry but that was the private key you sent me, That key is now compromised and you will need to remove it and generate new keys anywhere it was used"
I almost regret not allowing passwords, almost, despite the headaches key based is still much better.
About to say, users just drop the key on their desktop and then download random exe's from the internet and run them.
Still safter in general, but not bulletproof.
At least in that case, if the account is compromised we definitely didn't leak the credentials. That we don't have them to leak is one of the advantages of key-based auth.
[of course not having the credentials to leak does not protect us from this sort of bug, it is just one factor in a multipart security stance]
If you refused, would you get overruled internally?
Previous company: probably. It could be a dealbreaker for the client, and we bent over quite readily on a number of issues considered minor (keys are best practise, but passwords are so common it is difficult to argue that they are so bad they should be refused).
Current state (now we have been bought and are effectively more than an order of magnitude bigger): I definitely don't have opportunity to make a unilateral decision like that. Even though the larger company has a more “fair enough, feel free to go elsewhere” attitude when a small client says “if you can support × that is a dealbreaker for us” then we could previously afford to take as our stance, some of the bigger clients are definitely paying us enough, and do use passwords, that someone above me would overrule a keys-only decision.