On 01/16/2016 10:57 AM, Reco wrote: > - anyone can connect up to 16 times via ssh. > - anyone exceeding the connection limit is tarpitted, and must wait > for an hour to try again. Note that while this may be adequate for your use case, I would caution that 16 connections / hour can easily (!) be exceeded by regular SSH usage. If you have pubkey authentication (with an agent that remembers the key's passphrase) and have command line completion on the shell that also works with SSH, tabbing through scp options can easily produce more than 16 new SSH connections within a few minutes only. Example: scp host:/srv/d<TAB> scp host:/srv/data/w<TAB> scp host:/srv/data/website/ex<TAB> scp host:/srv/data/website/example.com/... (you get the picture) On my system with something like that I got more than 5 new SSH connections within just a few seconds - and while most shell completion implementations cache this data to a certain extent, 16 / hour seems really low for such a use case. Also, if you use modern desktop environments (e.g. GNOME, KDE), they can directly access e.g. SFTP from many programs (such as text editors etc.) - but those may close connections when they are idle for a time and re-open them - so directly editing a file via SFTP from a program might lead to a LOT of new SSH connections over the course of a short period of time. As I said: for your use case this might not be relevant, so I don't want to say that the solution presented here is wrong, it will be perfectly fine for a good many situations; I just wanted to illustrate that there are legitimate use cases where it is possible to exceed that limit easily. Obviously, you could increase the limit by a bit - because even if you allow let's say 10000 connections per hour and IP, that would still make brute force rather difficult... OTOH, I haven't put any thought into the best trade-off between security and usability here, and I just made up the number 10000, so please don't just use that number unconditionally either. Regards, Christian
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