SSH keys are a way to identify trusted computers, without involving passwords. The steps below will walk you through generating an SSH key and adding the public key to the server. Step 1: Check for SSH Keys First, check for existing SSH keys on your computer. Open Git Bash, Cygwin, or Terminal, etc. Aug 09, 2018 Generate SSH Keys on Windows 10 with PuTTY. To generate a key pair with the PuTTY key generator, simply run andputtygen.exe click the Generate button in the window that appears. You will be asked to move the mouse and press keys to improve the random number generation at the heart of SSH security. If you don't already have an SSH key, you must generate a new SSH key.If you're unsure whether you already have an SSH key, check for existing keys. If you don't want to reenter your passphrase every time you use your SSH key, you can add your key to the SSH agent, which manages your SSH keys and remembers your passphrase. In this particular instance ssh-import-id retrieves an SSH key from GitHub for you. The tool can import from both GitHub and Launchpad. Normally the tool takes the retrieved key and adds it to your authorized keys file which is what Ubuntu Server would have been doing. This section of the Ubuntu Server Guide introduces a powerful collection of tools for the remote control of, and transfer of data between, networked computers called OpenSSH.You will also learn about some of the configuration settings possible with the OpenSSH server application and how to change them on your Ubuntu.
This article shows how to configure a SSH connection for authentication by using the public-key method. To do this, a key pair is created at the client, the public part of the key is transferred to the server, and afterwards the server is set up for key authentication. The user can log on to the server without a login password, only the password is required to protect the private key.The operating systems used in this article are on the one hand a Ubuntu 12.10 at the client side and a Ubuntu 12.04 at the server side.This guide was also validated working with Ubuntu 16.04 as client and server.
The first configuration steps take place at the client side.
By default, Ubuntu sets the user home directory permissions to 755. Nevertheless, for security reasons, check whether the permissions are set to 755 on your system and change them if necessary:
:~$ sudo chmod 755 /home/<USER>
In the first step, a key pair with ssh-keygen is created at the client. If you use Ubuntu 18.04 on the server, the package openssh-server will be installed in the version 7.6.[1] Since this version, RSA bit lengths smaller than 1024 bits are no longer accepted.[2] In this example, a bit length of 4096 bits is selected for the RSA keys:
Please note: It is recommended to protect the key with a passphrase for security reasons. This means that the key is not available in plain text, but is AES-CBC encrypted:
If the private key is stolen by an attacker, he has to find out the password of the key in order to access the server with the key. Gta 4 generate serial key. If the key is available in plain text, an attacker can use this stolen key to directly access the server.
To transfer the public key to the server, the first step is to use the SSH connection via password authentication yet. The ssh-copy-id tool copies the corresponding identity file to the server:
The above-mentioned procedure has created the following entry in the /home/tktest/.ssh/authorized_keyson the server:
Now that the public key is transferred to the server, the connection can be tested from the client. In this case, it is important that the server does not ask for the user password, but of course the passphrase of the protected key is required!
The following dialog box appears for GUI-based systems:
After entering the password that protected the key when it was created, you are authenticated on the system:
This paragraph shows some additional configuration steps on the server side to harden the public-key authentication.
In Ubuntu, it is generally sufficient to carry out the above-mentioned procedure for public-key authentication. In some situations it makes sense to deactivate password authentication completely.
Please note: After changing the following setting, it is no longer possible to log in with a password via ssh: PasswordAuthentication no.
From the client, the connection is tested again:
In the above example, the dialog for entering the key password has been aborted. Since the log-on via password was deactivated, it was not possible to log-on to the system.
Another way in which password authentication is not completely deactivated is to disable password authentication for specific users. This allows a user who does not have sudo privileges to log on to the server, for example. To gain root privileges, at least one additional password must be found for a user with sudo privileges. Plus, there's a way to completely exclude users from ssh:
This example:
testtktestFor other Linux distributions, the required steps may differ slightly. We would be happy to supplement our experiences with other distributions, which you are welcome to share with us via the feedback function.
One reader told us that the procedure described Red Hat does not work 1:1 in Red Hat. In the home directory of the user, the write permission was set for the group. After a chmod 755 it worked to connect via ssh to the server without asking for a password.