OpenSSH Root user account restriction – revisited

One of our article generated few more question regarding root login issues over ssh session. One of reader (eMBee) asks, "I need something that allows me to say: allow any users except root from anywhere, and root only from localhost. (over ssh session)".

PAM offers very powerful authentication control. You need to use the pam_access PAM module, which is mainly for access management. It provides login access control based on

• Login names
• Host or domain names
• Internet addresses or network IP numbers
• Terminal line names etc

Why pam_access matters?

On a production server, authorized login can come from any networked computer. Therefore, it is important to have tight control over users who are allowed to connect server via OpenSSH server.

How do I configure pam_access?

You need to edit following files:

1. /etc/pam.d/sshd - Linux PAM configuration file.
2. /etc/security/access.conf - By default rules for access management are taken from configuration this file. When someone logs in, the entry in this scanned and matched against rule. You can specify whether the login will be accepted or refused to user. General syntax is as follows:
   permission : username: origins

Where,

• permission : Permission field should be a "+" (access granted) or "-" (access denied)
  character.
• username : Linux system username/login name such as root, vivek etc. You can also specify group names. You can also use special keywod ALL (to match all username).
• origins : It is a list of one ore more tty names, host name, IP address, domain names that begin with . or special key words ALL or LOCAL

Let us say you want to allow user root and vivek login from IP address 202.54.1.20 only.

Open file /etc/security/access.conf

# vi /etc/security/access.conf

Append following line:

-: ALL EXCEPT root vivek:202.54.1.20

Save the file and Open /etc/pam.d/sshd file :

# vi /etc/pam.d/sshd

Append following entry

account required pam_access.so

Save and close the file.

Now ssh will only accept login access from root/vivek from IP address 202.54.1.20. Now if user vivek (or root) try to login ssh server from IP address 203.111.12.3 he will get
'Connection closed by xxx.xxx.xx.xx'; error and following log entry should be written to your log file:

# tailf /var/log/message

Output:

Aug  2 19:02:39 web02 pam_access[2091]: access denied for user `vivek' from `203.111.12.3'

Remember, as soon as you save changes to /etc/security/access.conf, they are applied by PAM configuration. So be careful when writing rules.

More examples

a) I need something that allows me to say: allow any users except root from anywhere, and root only from localhost.

-:root:ALL EXCEPT LOCAL

OR

-:root:ALL EXCEPT localhost

b) Deny network and local login to all users except for user root and vivek:

-:ALL EXCEPT root vivek:ALL

c) Only allow root user login from 192.168.1.0/24 network:

+ : root : 192.168.1.0/24

Please note that this kind of restriction can be applied to any PAM aware application/service such as ftpd, telnet etc.