Force password authentication (ignore keys in .ssh folder) in Paramiko in Python

Question

I'm trying to write a small Python program to check whether an SSH server allows a password authentication. Here is the current plan:

import base64
import paramiko
client = paramiko.SSHClient()
client.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())
client.connect('ssh.example.com', username='strongbad', password='thecheat')
stdin, stdout, stderr = client.exec_command('ls')
for line in stdout:
    print('... ' + line.strip('\n'))
client.close()

The idea is to grep the output or to later put a try catch block around the connect statement.

My problem however is that some of the systems that I run the program on have access via a RSA key that is stored under ~/.ssh. And in these cases, the connect will simply succeed (which I want to avoid).

So, here is the question: Does anybody know any way to force Paramiko (or another SSH client) to use passwords?

Thanks

Answer 1

The SSHClient.connect method has look_for_keys argument. Set it to False:

client.connect(
    'ssh.example.com', username='strongbad', password='thecheat',
    look_for_keys=False)

Similarly you may want to set allow_agent to False as well.

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Obligatory warning: Do not use AutoAddPolicy, unless you do not care about security. You are losing a protection against MITM attacks this way.
For a correct solution, see Paramiko "Unknown Server".