SSH Hardening for Alpine Linux

339 words; 2 minute(s)

Table of Contents

Overview

This guide follows the standard ssh-audit hardening guide, tweaked for Alpine Linux.

Hardening Guide

These steps must be performed as root. You can try to use doas or sudo, but there may be issues.

  1. Re-generate the RSA and ED25519 keys
rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_*
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key -N ""
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key -N ""
  1. Remove small Diffie-Hellman moduli
awk '$5 >= 3071' /etc/ssh/moduli > /etc/ssh/moduli.safe
mv /etc/ssh/moduli.safe /etc/ssh/moduli
  1. Enable the RSA and ED25519 HostKey directives in the /etc/ssh/sshd~config~ file
sed -i 's/^\#HostKey \/etc\/ssh\/ssh_host_\(rsa\|ed25519\)_key$/HostKey \/etc\/ssh\/ssh_host_\1_key/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  1. Restrict supported key exchange, cipher, and MAC algorithms
echo -e "\n# Restrict key exchange, cipher, and MAC algorithms, as per sshaudit.com\n# hardening guide.\nKexAlgorithms [email protected],curve25519-sha256,[email protected],diffie-hellman-group16-sha512,diffie-hellman-group18-sha512,diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256\nCiphers [email protected],[email protected],[email protected],aes256-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes128-ctr\nMACs [email protected],[email protected],[email protected]\nHostKeyAlgorithms ssh-ed25519,[email protected],[email protected],[email protected],rsa-sha2-512,[email protected],rsa-sha2-256,[email protected]" > /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/ssh-audit_hardening.conf
  1. Include the /etc/ssh/sshd~config~.d directory
echo -e "Include /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/*.conf" > /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  1. Restart OpenSSH server
rc-service sshd restart

Testing SSH

You can test the results with the ssh-audit python script.

pip3 install ssh-audit
ssh-audit localhost

If everything succeeded, the results will show as all green. If anything is yellow, orange, or red, you may need to tweak additional settings.

#+caption: ssh audit

ssh-audit