I'm using dropbear to unlock my lvm/luks partition on a remote server during system boot. I've added dropbear to initramfs and I can connect and authenticate using public keys. But unfortunately, using public keys is the only available option.

I know public key authentication is epic and generally considered to be so much superior to passwords, but nevertheless, I'd like to have the option to use a password. But dropbear doesn't list "password" as a valid authentication method.

How can I enable this? I was unable to find a configuration file for dropbear and my /etc/ssh/sshd_config allows me to use passwords. Also, I can login using passwords as soon as the system has booted and openssh takes over.

I'm on Ubuntu 16.04.1

  • not sure if this is still an issue for you, but I'd be surprised if the dropbear SSH server used the sshd configuration file for the dropbear ssh server. That said, I haven't looked into if that's even a thing. I'm currently messing around with dropbear, and in the past most of the time when I have an issue with ssh and passwords 70% of the time it's related to PAM – ipatch Jun 12 '18 at 14:22

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