Book Image

pfSense 2 Cookbook

By : Matt Williamson, Matthew D Williamson
Book Image

pfSense 2 Cookbook

By: Matt Williamson, Matthew D Williamson

Overview of this book

pfSense is an open source distribution of FreeBSD-based firewall that provides a platform for flexible and powerful routing and firewalling. The versatility of pfSense presents us with a wide array of configuration options, which makes determining requirements a little more difficult and a lot more important, compared to other offerings. Through this book you will see that pfSense offers numerous alternatives to fit any environment's security needs. pfSense 2.0 Cookbook is the first and only book to explore all the features of pfSense, including those released in the latest 2.0 version. With the help of step-by-step instructions and detailed screenshots of the pfSense interface you will be able to configure every general and advanced feature from creating a firewall rule to configuring multi-WAN failover. Each recipe includes tips and offers advice on variations of the topic or references to other related recipes and additional information that can be found from other sources. pfSense 2.0 Cookbook covers the gamut of available features and functionality. The first three chapters will take you from a non-existent system to a basic pfSense firewall. The next chapter focuses on configuring any number of the VPN services available, a very important and sought-after feature for anyone implementing a firewall. The following two chapters describe how to configure the most advanced features available in pfSense; features that may only be relevant to the most experienced network admins. Chapter 7 is dedicated to understanding and configuring the "grab-bag" of features that are available in pfSense, but are often stand-alone options and unrelated to each other. The first appendix explains how to use the status monitoring tools available for many of the features. The second appendix wraps up with helping you to decide how and where pfSense may be incorporated into your system and what type of hardware is required based on your throughput needs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
pfSense 2 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Configuring SSH RSA key authentication


This recipe describes how to configure pfSense to use an RSA key rather than a password for SSH authentication.

Getting ready

Make sure that SSH is already enabled and you have generated a public key for your client.

How to do it...

  1. Browse to System | Advanced | Secure Shell.

  2. Check Disable password login for Secure Shell (RSA key only).

  3. Edit the user we will associate with the client's public key from System | User Manager | Edit admin.

  4. Select Click to paste an authorized key and paste our client's public RSA key here. When pasted, the key should appear as a single line. Be sure your text editor didn't insert any line feed characters or authentication may fail.

  5. Save the changes.

How it works...

When we connect using an SSH client, we won't be asked for a password. Instead, the SSH server will use its copy of the public RSA key to send a challenge that can only be read if you posses the matching private key.

There's more...

RSA private keys can also be stored encrypted on the client machine. The SSH client will prompt for a decryption passphrase for the private key before being able to use it for authentication with the server.

See also

  • The Enabling the Secure Shell (SSH) recipe

  • The Generating authorized RSA keys recipe

  • The Accessing the Secure Shell (SSH) recipe