Saturday, August 20, 2016

(Re-)Enabling DSS for key-based authentication

By default, recent versions of OpenSSH don't employ DSS-based authentication. Some claim this is due to performance reasons (RSA encrypts faster, DSS decrypts faster) and others will point to vague discussions on security. It appears to be a preference by the maintainer.

It's not that the server refuses to use DSS. DSS is actually disabled in the client. To enable the use of DSS, create ~/.ssh/config containing the following line:

PubKeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-dss

You shouldn't need to restart any service. The next time that you use your client, DSS authentication should work.

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