SSHing to an older Cisco ASA from a new Mac

Newer SSH clients such as on MacOS 10.14 (Mojave) may not want to use the old key sizes and cipher suites on an ASA.

One error message is about key exchange parameters:

no matching key exchange method found. Their offer: diffie-hellman-group1-sha1

Can fix this by using the older key exchange algorithm as an command line option:

ssh -oKexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 username@myasa.com

This can then be fixed server-side on the ASA by configuring Group 14 (2048-bit keys)

ASA(config)# ssh key-exchange group ?
configure mode commands/options:
  dh-group1-sha1   Diffie-Hellman group 2
  dh-group14-sha1  Diffie-Hellman group 14
ASA(config)# ssh key-exchange group dh-group14-sha1

Likewise may get messages about cipher suites not matching:

no matching cipher found. Their offer: aes128-cbc,3des-cbc,aes192-cbc,aes256-cbc

Workaround is to specify ciphers as an option to SSH:

ssh -c aes128-cbc,3des-cbc username@myasa.com

 

 

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