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passwordless cisco router SSH login

Hello,

How do I setup passwordless SSH authentication to login to my cisco router? Do I need k9 IOS?

Thanks!

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ArneLovius

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Jimmy Larsson, CISSP, CEH

Passwordless SSH is not supported since any username created needs to have a password.

Best regards
Kvistofta

chainfear

ASKER

If I want to write a script that do something with cisco router/switch,do I need to put the password in clear text? Is there anyway to avoid that? This is why I am asking for passwordless SSH into a router.

Thanks for all the efforts

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Jimmy Larsson, CISSP, CEH

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ArneLovius

Once you have setup key based auth, your connection would be in the form of user@host, no password is used.

the password is in effect the public key ssh key on the host that you are connecting from, so keeping the private key secure is important (usually in ~.ssh/ but no password is required to be in the script

@Kvistofta there is no password with key based auth see how the hash of the id_rsa.pub is used http://blog.ioshints.info/2009/10/ssh-rsa-authentication-works-in-ios.html

Jimmy Larsson, CISSP, CEH

Yes you are right but the effect is the same: The user running the script needs to have access to the private key.