Passwordless logins

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Revision as of 19:38, 27 April 2015 by ThorstenStaerk (Talk | contribs)

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With Linux, it is possible to log in to a remote computer without having to type a password. You authenticate yourself with your "digital signature" and your public key.

You want to log in using ssh to a remote computer without being asked for a password.
Establish a trust relationship so your desktop's ssh key is authorized on your server like this:
desktop:~ # ssh-keygen -t dsa
Generating public/private dsa key pair.
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
The key fingerprint is:
1c:9a:b8:03:ab:04:b3:7b:75:49:99:8c:51:79:5d:06 root@scorpio

Now you just need to copy your public key to the remote machine so that it can recognize you:

desktop:~ # ssh-copy-id -i .ssh/ root@server

In this example, you create a key pair with no passphrase and distribute the public key from the computer desktop to server. The user root from desktop no longer needs to authenticate with his password, he can log in to server from desktop with the command

desktop:~ # ssh server
Welcome to server.
server:~ #
The ssh folder contains a file authorized keys that contains host keys of trusted hosts. ssh-copy-id adds to this file. Instead of calling ssh-copy-id, you can also issue
desktop:~ # cat ~/.ssh/ | ssh root@server "cat >>.ssh/authorized_keys" 

However, this command is error-prone because on some distributions, e.g. Red Hat, the file authorized_keys needs special permission settings. Better stick to ssh-copy-id.