Sometime ago I changed the uploader to use sftp instead of ftp. It apparently has been working fine but I just noticed that in the upload log is the message “SSH public key authentication failed: Unable to open public key file” and this has been happening ever since the change to sftp. Any ideas what’s going wrong here? I can run sftp to my site successfully from the Terminal command line. I am using Freeway Pro 7.1.4 on macOS 10.14.4.
freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
The SSH tool will try to use public key authentication if it is available, in preference to password. Then it falls back to password, which is just as secure, but not as convenient.
Walter
On Jan 30, 2020, at 7:03 AM, AdrianLucas email@hidden wrote:
Sometime ago I changed the uploader to use sftp instead of ftp. It apparently has been working fine but I just noticed that in the upload log is the message “SSH public key authentication failed: Unable to open public key file” and this has been happening ever since the change to sftp. Any ideas what’s going wrong here? I can run sftp to my site successfully from the Terminal command line. I am using Freeway Pro 7.1.4 on macOS 10.14.4.
Absolutely. That’s the cornerstone of how this works. SSH (Secure Shell) is the protocol used by SFTP. You’re basically tunneling FTP (which was designed in a gentler age) through an SSH connection, and that’s as secure as the crypto-nerds can make it. If someone has broken SSH, I don’t know about it. Your password itself would be guessed before the underlying crypto would give up.
What shared-key authentication does is put your public key (half of the public/private SSH key pair) directly on the server, where the server can use it to authenticate and decrypt messages signed with your private key. I have this set up on all my servers, so I never have to type a password to “shell in” and administer them. This is not something that is easy to do if you haven’t had experience administering a Linux or Unix server, and I’m not going to try to give you a step-by-step how-to unless you have, at which point I would be telling you something you already knew.
Walter
On Feb 2, 2020, at 10:18 AM, AdrianLucas email@hidden wrote:
Could you just confirm that under these circumstances the password is encrypted before being sent to the server for logon.