SSH and Keys

Key Generation

On the server run the following command to create a pair of keys in ~/.ssh/ (or whatever the default is configured to on your system):

ssh-keygen

Disclaimer: You may need to install the cryptography packages and openSSH on your system.

The command will create the following files:

• id_rsa: Your private key. This will identify the user on this machine.
• id_rsa.pub: The public counterpart of the private key. This is distributed to other users.

On the client machine, copy/append the contents of id_rsa.pub from the server to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys (or whatever it is configured to on your system)
The user on the server should not be able to remotely log into the client without the use of password (as long as the connection is secure)

Example commands

The following example shows how to copy a file from the local machine to a remote machine. The command should not ask for a password if the above steps have been followed correctly and the SSH server is set-up to accept key authentication:

ssh [user@][host] cat < [local_file] ">" [remote_location]

The following example does the opposite: it copies a remote file to a local location:

ssh [user@][host] cat [remote_file] > [local_location]