Cody Richardson

Overview Most personal computers and many organizations running Linux servers utilize password-based authentication. This is what most of us are used to -- you enter a username and password in order to authenticate your account and gain access to a system. While straightforward and commonplace, this isn't the best solution in most cases. Today I'll be explaining why key based authentication is more convenient, more secure, and allows for automation of tasks without saving credentials in plain-text in a text file. Key based authentication involves the use of private and public keys ( public-key cryptography ). The private key is stored on the client and the public key is stored on the server in a special file ( ~/.ssh/authorized_keys ). This allows any system with the corresponding private key to login to the server where we just stored the public key. Our steps are: Generate key pair (public / private key). Transfer public key and add it to the authorized_keys file on the remot