Linux Administration Cookbook

Ed25519 example

As with our RSA example, we will start by generating a new key, this time specifying the type as 'ed25519'.

Ed25519 keys are elliptical-curve based and a lot of very clever people believe they offer superior security to RSA. The keys themselves are also much shorter (which we'll touch on later,) meaning if you've ever got to type one out, it's a lot less work. Annoyingly you can't use the public half of an Ed25519 key for encrypting files, as you can with an RSA public half, so there's a trade off but it depends on your needs.

We will again accept the default location for where to save our key, and provide a passphrase:

[vagrant@centos1 ~]$ ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "Example Ed25519 key"Generating public/private ed25519 key ...