SSH using Public-Key Authentication

Lately, I’ve been implementing a solution to make SSH connections more secure and manageable (i.e., getting away from password authentication). A couple of benefits public-key authentication has over the default password authentication is: Memorize only the passphrase of your private key rather than possibly dozens of username/password combinations for remote hosts. A password sent across the network, even protected by an SSH secure channel, can be captured when it arrives on the remote host if that host has been compromised. Steps Generate the key pair. RSA authentication will need a passphrase to encrypt the private key. It’s highly recommended to create a strong passphrase for the private key. A strong passphrase is at least 10 - 15 characters long and not a grammatical sentence. The following command creates a 4096-bit RSA key pair and also prompts you for a passphrase: ...

March 29, 2010 · 2 min

SSL VPN configuration for Cisco ASA with AnyConnect VPN client

This post is a guide to configure a Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) device to perform remote access SSL VPN with the stand-alone Cisco AnyConnect VPN client. I followed a few tutorials on the web (including a couple of examples from the Cisco website), but I failed to implement a complete solution. The following recipe has been thoroughly tested and verified. Ingredients used for this post: Cisco 5500 Series ASA with software version 8.0(2) Cisco AnyConnect SSL VPN client version for Windows 2.3.0254 1. Copy AnyConnect package to the Cisco ASA device. ...

December 12, 2009 · 2 min