Getting Started with SSH

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When you use Linux based servers, security is number one priority. SSH provides a way to login to your remote server securely.

You can however disable password based logins and only allow logins through private and public key setup. We will cover, how to do this in later chapter.

Like password logins, which are ok! private and public keys provides another way to login to you remote server.

Keys are considered more secure in most cases and they provide convenience to login to your remote server quickly. You just have to keep your private key safe.
If you end up disabling password authentication, and you also lost your private key, there is potentially no other way to login to your remote server.

You can use different set of keys for different remote servers, this will demand more manageability. Good thing is that if one server key has been compromised then you can disable it, per server basis.

You can also use one set of keys across different servers, this can be a security nightmare, If you know that a private key has been compromised, you have to create a new key pairs and delete the old ones, pretty much straight away.
Let's now see how it works!

Your machine with private key tries to connect to remote servers which hosts matching public key.

Server checks if private and public keys matches.
If it does? then access is granted and you are able to access remote server shell.
However! if keys doesn't match, then access is denied.

In In next chapter we’ll see how we can generate Private and Public keys on Windows machine.