As an enhanced security measure, OpenSSH server comes with root login disabled by default. Enabling this is a straightforward process and involves editing a configuration file, /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

The critical parts of this are the two entries:

• PermitRootLogin: This can be set to yes if you want to log in as root
• PasswordAuthentication: This needs to be set to yes instead of the default no to log in using passwords.

Once you are done performing the changes, you will need to restart the ssh service:

sudo service ssh restart

With that, our Kali Machine on the cloud is up and running and can be accessed over SSH using a password. However, SSH only gives you a command line interface.

In the next section, we will take a look at how we can set up a remote desktop service to get GUI access to our Kali Machine.