Secure Shell provides public key and password methods for authenticating the connection to the remote host. Public key authentication is a stronger authentication mechanism than password authentication because the private key never travels over the network.
The authentication methods are tried in the following order. When the configuration does not satisfy an authentication method, the next method is tried.
GSS-API – Uses credentials for GSS-API mechanisms such as mech_krb5 (Kerberos V) and mech_dh (AUTH_DH) to authenticate clients and servers. For more information about GSS-API, see Introduction to GSS-API in Developer’s Guide to Oracle Solaris 11 Security .
Host-based authentication – Uses host keys and rhosts files. Uses the client's RSA and DSA public/private host keys to authenticate the client. Uses the rhosts files to authorize clients to users.
Public key authentication – Authenticates users with their RSA and DSA public/private keys.
Password authentication – Uses PAM to authenticate users. Keyboard authentication method in v2 allows for arbitrary prompting by PAM. For more information, see the SECURITY section in the sshd(1M) man page.
The following table shows the requirements for authenticating a user who is trying to log into a remote host. The user is on the local host, the client. The remote host, the server, is running the sshd daemon. The table shows the Secure Shell authentication methods and the host requirements.
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