Jul 08, 2019 Step 1 — Create the RSA Key Pair. The first step is to create a key pair on the client machine (usually your computer): ssh-keygen By default ssh-keygen will create a 2048-bit RSA key pair, which is secure enough for most use cases (you may optionally pass in the -b 4096 flag to create a larger 4096-bit key). Generate RSA key pair and encode private as string. Ask Question Asked 10 years ago. Active 1 year, 1 month ago. How do I generate RSA key pair in JAVA (in.
SSH, or secure shell, is an encrypted protocol used to administer and communicate with servers. When working with a Debian server, chances are you will spend most of your time in a terminal session connected to your server through SSH.
In this guide, we’ll focus on setting up SSH keys for a vanilla Debian 10 installation. SSH keys provide an easy, secure way of logging into your server and are recommended for all users.
The first step is to create a key pair on the client machine (usually your computer):
By default ssh-keygen
will create a 2048-bit RSA key pair, which is secure enough for most use cases (you may optionally pass in the -b 4096
flag to create a larger 4096-bit key).
After entering the command, you should see the following output:
Press enter to save the key pair into the .ssh/
subdirectory in your home directory, or specify an alternate path.
If you had previously generated an SSH key pair, you may see the following prompt:
Warning: If you choose to overwrite the key on disk, you will not be able to authenticate using the previous key anymore. Be very careful when selecting yes, as this is a destructive process that cannot be reversed.
You should then see the following prompt:
Here you optionally may enter a secure passphrase, which is highly recommended. A passphrase adds an additional layer of security to prevent unauthorized users from logging in. To learn more about security, consult our tutorial on How To Configure SSH Key-Based Authentication on a Linux Server.
You should then see the following output:
You now have a public and private key that you can use to authenticate. The next step is to place the public key on your server so that you can use SSH-key-based authentication to log in.
The quickest way to copy your public key to the Debian host is to use a utility called ssh-copy-id
. Due to its simplicity, this method is highly recommended if available. If you do not have ssh-copy-id
available to you on your client machine, you may use one of the two alternate methods provided in this section (copying via password-based SSH, or manually copying the key).
ssh-copy-id
The ssh-copy-id
Download cd key generator nba 2k14. tool is included by default in many operating systems, so you may have it available on your local system. For this method to work, you must already have password-based SSH access to your server.
To use the utility, you simply need to specify the remote host that you would like to connect to and the user account that you have password SSH access to. This is the account to which your public SSH key will be copied.
The syntax is:
You may see the following message:
This means that your local computer does not recognize the remote host. This will happen the first time you connect to a new host. Type “yes” and press ENTER
to continue.
Next, the utility will scan your local account for the id_rsa.pub
key that we created earlier. When it finds the key, it will prompt you for the password of the remote user’s account:
Type in the password (your typing will not be displayed for security purposes) and press ENTER
. The utility will connect to the account on the remote host using the password you provided. It will then copy the contents of your ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
key into a file in the remote account’s home ~/.ssh
directory called authorized_keys
.
You should see the following output:
At this point, your id_rsa.pub
key has been uploaded to the remote account. You can continue on to Step 3.
If you do not have ssh-copy-id
available, but you have password-based SSH access to an account on your server, you can upload your keys using a conventional SSH method.
We can do this by using the cat
command to read the contents of the public SSH key on our local computer and piping that through an SSH connection to the remote server.
On the other side, we can make sure that the ~/.ssh
directory exists and has the correct permissions under the account we’re using.
We can then output the content we piped over into a file called authorized_keys
within this directory. We’ll use the >>
redirect symbol to append the content instead of overwriting it. This will let us add keys without destroying previously added keys.
The full command looks like this:
You may see the following message:
This means that your local computer does not recognize the remote host. This will happen the first time you connect to a new host. Type “yes” and press ENTER
to continue.
Afterwards, you should be prompted to enter the remote user account password:
After entering your password, the content of your id_rsa.pub
key will be copied to the end of the authorized_keys
file of the remote user’s account. Continue on to Step 3 if this was successful.
If you do not have password-based SSH access to your server available, you will have to complete the above process manually.
We will manually append the content of your id_rsa.pub
file to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
file on your remote machine.
To display the content of your id_rsa.pub
key, type this into your local computer:
You will see the key’s content, which should look something like this:
Access your remote host using whichever method you have available.
Once you have access to your account on the remote server, you should make sure the ~/.ssh
directory exists. This command will create the directory if necessary, or do nothing if it already exists:
Now, you can create or modify the authorized_keys
file within this directory. You can add the contents of your id_rsa.pub
file to the end of the authorized_keys
file, creating it if necessary, using this command:
In the above command, substitute the public_key_string
with the output from the cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
command that you executed on your local system. It should start with ssh-rsa AAAA..
.
Finally, we’ll ensure that the ~/.ssh
directory and authorized_keys
file have the appropriate permissions set:
This recursively removes all “group” and “other” permissions for the ~/.ssh/
directory.
If you’re using the root
account to set up keys for a user account, it’s also important that the ~/.ssh
directory belongs to the user and not to root
:
In this tutorial our user is named sammy but you should substitute the appropriate username into the above command.
We can now attempt passwordless authentication with our Debian server.
If you have successfully completed one of the procedures above, you should be able to log into the remote host without the remote account’s password.
The basic process is the same:
If this is your first time connecting to this host (if you used the last method above), you may see something like this:
This means that your local computer does not recognize the remote host. Type “yes” and then press ENTER
to continue.
If you did not supply a passphrase for your private key, you will be logged in immediately. If you supplied a passphrase for the private key when you created the key, you will be prompted to enter it now (note that your keystrokes will not display in the terminal session for security). After authenticating, a new shell session should open for you with the configured account on the Debian server.
If key-based authentication was successful, continue on to learn how to further secure your system by disabling password authentication.
If you were able to log into your account using SSH without a password, you have successfully configured SSH-key-based authentication to your account. However, your password-based authentication mechanism is still active, meaning that your server is still exposed to brute-force attacks.
Before completing the steps in this section, make sure that you either have SSH-key-based authentication configured for the root account on this server, or preferably, that you have SSH-key-based authentication configured for a non-root account on this server with sudo
privileges. This step will lock down password-based logins, so ensuring that you will still be able to get administrative access is crucial.
Once you’ve confirmed that your remote account has administrative privileges, log into your remote server with SSH keys, either as root or with an account with sudo
privileges. Then, open up the SSH daemon’s configuration file:
Inside the file, search for a directive called PasswordAuthentication
. This may be commented out. Uncomment the line and set the value to “no”. This will disable your ability to log in via SSH using account passwords:
Save and close the file when you are finished by pressing CTRL
+ X
, then Y
to confirm saving the file, and finally ENTER
to exit nano. To actually implement these changes, we need to restart the sshd
service:
As a precaution, open up a new terminal window and test that the SSH service is functioning correctly before closing this session:
Once you have verified your SSH service, you can safely close all current server sessions.
The SSH daemon on your Debian server now only responds to SSH keys. Password-based authentication has successfully been disabled.
You should now have SSH-key-based authentication configured on your server, allowing you to sign in without providing an account password.
If you’d like to learn more about working with SSH, take a look at our SSH Essentials Guide.
Contents
Let us learn the basics of generating and using RSA keys in Java.
Java provides classes for the generation of RSA public and private key pairs with the package java.security. You can use RSA keys pairs in public key cryptography.
Public key cryptography uses a pair of keys for encryption. Distribute the public key to whoever needs it but safely secure the private key.
Public key cryptography can be used in two modes:
Encryption: Only the private key can decrypt the data encrypted with the public key.
Authentication: Data encrypted with the private key can only be decrypted with the public key thus proving who the data came from.
First step in creating an RSA Key Pair is to create a KeyPairGeneratorfrom a factory method by specifying the algorithm (“RSA
” in this instance):
Initialize the KeyPairGenerator with the key size. Use a key size of 1024 or 2048. Currently recommended key size for SSL certificates used in e-commerce is 2048 so that is what we use here.
From the KeyPair object, get the public key using getPublic() and the private key using getPrivate().
Save the keys to hard disk once they are obtained. This allows re-using the keys for encryption, decryption and authentication.
What is the format of the saved files? The key information is encoded in different formats for different types of keys. Here is how you can find what format the key was saved in. On my machine, the private key was saved in PKCS#8
format and the public key in X.509
format. We need this information below to load the keys.
After saving the private key to a file (or a database), you might need to load it at a later time. You can do that using the following code. Note that you need to know what format the data was saved in: PKCS#8 in our case.
Load the public key from a file as follows. The public key has been saved in X.509 format so we use the X509EncodedKeySpec class to convert it.
Save the keys in text format by encoding the data in Base64. Java 8 provides a Base64 class which can be used for the purpose. Save the private key with a comment as follows:
And the public key too (with a comment):
As mentioned above, one of the purposes of public key cryptography is digital signature i.e. you generate a digital signature from a file contents, sign it with your private key and send the signature along with the file. The recipient can then use your public key to verify that the signature matches the file contents.
Here is how you can do it. Use the signature algorithm “SHA256withRSA
” which is guaranteed to be supported on all JVMs. Use the private key (either generated or load from file as shown above) to initialize the Signatureobject for signing. It is then updated with contents from the data file and the signature is generated and written to the output file. This output file contains the digital signature and must be sent to the recipient for verification.
The recipient uses the digital signature sent with a data file to verify that the data file has not been tampered with. It requires access to the sender’s public key and can be loaded from a file if necessary as presented above.
The code below updates the Signature object with data from the data file. /microsoft-powerpoint-2010-product-key-generator-download.html. It then loads the signature from file and uses Signature.verify() to check if the signature is valid.
And that in a nutshell is how you can use RSA public and private keys for digital signature and verification.
Go here for the source code.