Is it safe to open ssh port to world with only key based authentication?

[John Wendel]

Mike Klinke wrote:
> On Wednesday 23 November 2005 02:00, Vijay Gill wrote:
> 
> 
>>Recently I started using key based authentication and disabled
>>passwords in /etc/ssh/sshd_conf My question is, is it safe to
>>open the port 22 in my iptables firewall script?
> 
> 
> There's no black and white answer to that.  On a scale of 1 to 10 
> you might want to assign numbers as follows:
> 
> 1 = unsafe
> 3 = password authentication enabled
> 6 = key based authentication only
> 7 = allowing only certain IP address to access
> 10 = no access allowed to anyone
> 
> Some people are perfectly comfortable using strong passwords and 
> will consider anything over a '2' to be "safe".  Others would only 
> consider "safe" to be something at '7' or better and I'm certain 
> you'll hear that '10' is the only sure defense.  
> 
> Regards, Mike Klinke
> 


I use a different port number (like 12322) and change it frequently. 
Makes it a little harder for the port scanners to find you.

Regards,

John