Practical Linux Security Cookbook - Second Edition

How to do it...

To use key-based authentication, we need to create a pair of keys – a private key and a public key:

1. On the client or local system,  execute the following command to generate the SSH key pairs:

          ssh-keygen -t rsa

While creating the key, we can accept the default values or change them as we wish. It will also ask for a passphrase, for which you can choose anything or leave it blank.

2. The key-pair will be created in the location - ~./ssh/. Change to this directory and then use the  ls -l command to see the details of the key files:

We can see that the id_rsa file can be read and written only by the owner. This permission ...