Allowing SSH login for user without a password

To start with: This is something you should NOT use in most cases. It’s only intended to be used in very specific situations.

In my situation I want to allow some remote systems to create a reverse SSH tunnel without a password nor a key. It’s for hobby purposes and through firewalling I make sure that only those systems are allowed to connect to my ‘SSH proxy’.

I started by creating a group and a few users with that as their primary group:

groupadd reversessh
useradd -G reversessh user1
useradd -G reversessh user2
useradd -G reversessh user3
passwd -d user1
passwd -d user2
passwd -d user3

I then modified my /etc/ssh/sshd_config that it only allows specific groups and allows users with an empty password:

PermitEmptyPasswords yes
AllowGroups root reversessh

I also needed to modify PAM to make sure it allows this login. Therefor you need to modify /etc/pam.d/common-auth that it contains:

auth    [success=1 default=ignore]      pam_unix.so nullok

After I restarted SSH to users user1 until user3 were able to log on without a password nor a key.

Is this very secure? No! But it does serve a purpose in some use-cases.