Access Recovery

If you’ve lost the private key of an SSH key pair used to log into a Fedora system, and do not have any password logins set up to use at the console, you can gain access back to the machine with the following steps:

  1. When booting the system, intercept the GRUB menu and edit the entry to append init=/bin/bash`

  2. Wait for the system to boot into a shell prompt

Execute the following commands:

  • mount -t selinuxfs selinuxfs /sys/fs/selinux

  • /sbin/load_policy

  • passwd root

  • sync

  • /sbin/reboot -ff

Or alternatively, you can manually attempt to update e.g. ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.

Note that Fedora by default does not allow SSH login via password authentication.

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