How to enable or disable PasswordAuthentication in SSH

Introduction

The PasswordAuthentication option determines your ability to authenticate with a password via SSH. Password authentication is enabled in SSH by default.

Procedure

1. Sign in as the root user via SSH or use the "WHM / Terminal" menu.

2. Open the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config using your preferred command-line editor:

How to edit a file on command-line

3. Search for a line starting with the following:

PasswordAuthentication

4. To disable password authentication in SSH, set this option to "no":

PasswordAuthentication no

4.5. To enable password authentication, set this option to "yes":

PasswordAuthentication yes

5. Restart SSH to load the change by running the following script:

/scripts/restartsrv_sshd