This will be a relatively short post. It is my objective for this post to be useful for other individuals who are having issues setting up authy-ssh on their Secure Shell servers. First, if you’re not familiar with two-step verification, have a look at this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-step_verification

I was inspired to install this on one of my SSH servers due to enabling this feature on my Gmail account:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advanced-sign-in-security-for-your.html

I had heard about authy-ssh a while back through news.ycombinator but had never put the time into setting it up. To set it up you can follow these directions:

https://www.authy.com/products/ssh#installation

I ran into issues though. My SSH server did not possess ‘seq’ and I received error messages from the authy-ssh script that were not very clear. I then dug into the authy-ssh shell script and discovered that it heavily depended on ‘curl’ connecting to Authy’s web servers over https. ‘curl’ would give me SSL certificate errors and I’m highly confident this is an issue with ‘curl’ on my server and not Authy’s SSL certificates. To bypass this issue in the authy-ssh script at lines 398, 482, 497, 533, and 605 you will need to add on the ‘-k’ flag to ‘curl’ to ignore the SSL certificate errors. I will warn you that this is NOT very secure but if you need authy to work, this should work.

In addition to this, you may want to run this shell script as well:

http://zitstif.no-ip.org/authyfix.txt

The authy-ssh bash shell script does a check to see if bash exists or if seq exists. If you’re on an OSX system, the OSX equivalent of ‘seq’ is ‘jot’. The equivalent of ‘seq 10’ with ‘jot’ is ‘jot – 1 10’.