ssh, secure logins, no remote passwords, and other network security goodness

corprewland » set up ssh for no remote password login

Passwords are not particularly secure. It’s hard to make, remember, and use one that is hard for programs to guess. Therefore, people who case about security frequently use a package called OpenSSH for logging into remote hosts to work instead of telnet.

I’ve been working with a bunch of people for the last while, who wanted to have their sessions logging into remote machines not be trivially snoopable and also wanted to not have to remember their passwords for a bunch of machines. I wrote up a set of instructions based on openssh that are designed to make this relatively straightforward.

This is how I normally use remote unix boxes — set my password to an ludicrously long, difficult to crack/remember/whatever string and then use ssh and public key encryption to actually log in. It works for me. These instructions are probably most useful for MacOSX and other unix (Linux) users (and MS Windows users using cygwin on the command line.) Most Windows users will want to use Putty, which is a fine package of encryption tools for that platform.

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