Re: "too many auth failures"?

[Nicolas Williams <Nicolas.Williams%oracle.com@localhost>]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 06:54:47AM +0000, Love Hörnquist Åstrand wrote:
> Simon Josefsson <simon%josefsson.org@localhost> writes:
> > Isn't this another problem?  Often private keys are protected by a password
> > or requires a PIN to unlock a smartcard, and iterating to sign with all keys
> > becomes a user interface issue quickly.  This is how libssh2 works, and I
> > couldn't think of any way to avoid it.
> 
> Maybe I'm missing something, but you don't need to iterate over all
> keys since you can ask the ssh server if the public key is ok to use.

Yes, but servers can be configured to answer "yes" to all such probes.

>                               To avoid unnecessary processing and user
>    interaction, the following message is provided for querying whether
>    authentication using the "publickey" method would be acceptable.