User Management¶

The default VyOS user account (vyos), as well as newly created user accounts, have all capabilities to configure the system. All accounts have sudo capabilities and therefore can operate as root on the system.

Both local administered and remote administered RADIUS accounts are supported.

Local¶

Create new system user with username <name> and real-name specified by <string>.

Specify the plaintext password user by user <name> on this system. The plaintext password will be automatically transferred into a secure hashed password and not saved anywhere in plaintext.

Setup encrypted password for given username. This is useful for transferring a hashed password from system to system.

Key Based Authentication¶

It is highly recommended to use SSH key authentication. By default there is only one user (vyos), and you can assign any number of keys to that user. You can generate a ssh key with the ssh-keygen command on your local machine, which will (by default) save it as ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

Every SSH key comes in three parts:

ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABAA...VBD5lKwEWB username@host.example.com

Only the type (ssh-rsa) and the key (AAAB3N...) are used. Note that the key will usually be several hundred characters long, and you will need to copy and paste it. Some terminal emulators may accidentally split this over several lines. Be attentive when you paste it that it only pastes as a single line. The third part is simply an identifier, and is for your own reference.

Assign the SSH public key portion <key> identified by per-key <identifier> to the local user <username>.

Every SSH public key portion referenced by <identifier> requires the configuration of the <type> of public-key used. This type can be any of:

ecdsa-sha2-nistp256
ecdsa-sha2-nistp384
ecdsa-sha2-nistp521
ssh-dss
ssh-ed25519
ssh-rsa

Note

You can assign multiple keys to the same user by using a unique identifier per SSH key.

loadkey <username> <location>

SSH keys can not only be specified on the command-line but also loaded for a given user with <username> from a file pointed to by <location>. Keys can be either loaded from local filesystem or any given remote location using one of the following URIs:

<file> - Load from file on local filesystem path
scp://<user>@<host>:/<file> - Load via SCP from remote machine
sftp://<user>@<host>/<file> - Load via SFTP from remote machine
ftp://<user>@<host>/<file> - Load via FTP from remote machine
http://<host>/<file> - Load via HTTP from remote machine
tftp://<host>/<file> - Load via TFTP from remote machine

Example¶

In the following example, both User1 and User2 will be able to SSH into VyOS as user vyos using their very own keys.

set system login user vyos authentication public-keys 'User1' key "AAAAB3Nz...KwEW"
set system login user vyos authentication public-keys 'User1' type ssh-rsa
set system login user vyos authentication public-keys 'User2' key "AAAAQ39x...fbV3"
set system login user vyos authentication public-keys 'User2' type ssh-rsa

RADIUS¶

In large deployments it is not reasonable to configure each user individually on every system. VyOS supports using RADIUS servers as backend for user authentication.

Configuration¶

Specify the <address> of the RADIUS server user with the pre-shared-secret given in <secret>. Multiple servers can be specified.

Configure the discrete port under which the RADIUS server can be reached. This defaults to 1812.

Setup the <timeout> in seconds when querying the RADIUS server.

Temporary disable this RADIUS server. It won’t be queried.

RADIUS servers could be hardened by only allowing certain IP addresses to connect. As of this the source address of each RADIUS query can be configured. If this is not set, incoming connections to the RADIUS server will use the nearest interface address pointing towards the server - making it error prone on e.g. OSPF networks when a link fails and a backup route is taken.

Hint

If you want to have admin users to authenticate via RADIUS it is essential to sent the Cisco-AV-Pair shell:priv-lvl=15 attribute. Without the attribute you will only get regular, non privilegued, system users.