Using SSH keys for Password-less Logins. Most people start using SSH by logging in with a password, but re-entering your password for every SSH connection quickly becomes tedious. A better way is to set up a public/private key pair - you unlock your key once and then reuse it to make connections without entering your password. If you can, disable password logins in your “sshdconfig” file (on the server) and use keys instead. In case you travel and can’t carry your laptop with you, just keep your private key on a USB stick and attach it to your physical keychain. Your server will be much safer this way. Generate Public/Private SSH Key Pair.

With a secure shell (SSH) key pair, you can create virtual machines (VMs) in Azure that use SSH keys for authentication, eliminating the need for passwords to sign in. This article shows you how to quickly generate and use an SSH public-private key file pair for Linux VMs. You can complete these steps with the Azure Cloud Shell, a macOS or Linux host, the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and other tools that support OpenSSH.

I'm looking for a concrete algorithm to generate one time passwords. The situation is as follows: Alice and Bob exchanged a passphrase over a secure channel in the beginning. They want to symetrically encrypt data in the future, and every consecutive enryption/decryption process. One-time pad encoder/decoder and key generator: The one-time pad (OTP) encryption technique is the only proven unbreakable encryption system. Even infinite computational power and time cannot break this system. Implementation of the one-time pad system This tool allows you to enter a message in any language, e.g.: English, Chinese, Russian etc. We have decided to start work on Multi-factor authentication, by way of releasing an iPhone, Android and Blackberry app for our customers. Think Google Authenticator's one-time password system. I can get how I could generate a unique string by hashing using a SALT based on the account secret key plus the device serial number (or other unique identifier).

Note

VMs created using SSH keys are by default configured with passwords disabled, which greatly increases the difficulty of brute-force guessing attacks.

For more background and examples, see Detailed steps to create SSH key pairs.

For additional ways to generate and use SSH keys on a Windows computer, see How to use SSH keys with Windows on Azure.

Supported SSH key formats

Azure currently supports SSH protocol 2 (SSH-2) RSA public-private key pairs with a minimum length of 2048 bits. Other key formats such as ED25519 and ECDSA are not supported.

Create an SSH key pair

Use the ssh-keygen command to generate SSH public and private key files. By default, these files are created in the ~/.ssh directory. You can specify a different location, and an optional password (passphrase) to access the private key file. If an SSH key pair with the same name exists in the given location, those files are overwritten.

The following command creates an SSH key pair using RSA encryption and a bit length of 4096:

If you use the Azure CLI to create your VM with the az vm create command, you can optionally generate SSH public and private key files using the --generate-ssh-keys option. The key files are stored in the ~/.ssh directory unless specified otherwise with the --ssh-dest-key-path option. The --generate-ssh-keys option will not overwrite existing key files, instead returning an error. In the following command, replace VMname and RGname with your own values:

Provide an SSH public key when deploying a VM

To create a Linux VM that uses SSH keys for authentication, specify your SSH public key when creating the VM using the Azure portal, Azure CLI, Azure Resource Manager templates, or other methods:

If you're not familiar with the format of an SSH public key, you can display your public key with the following cat command, replacing ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub with the path and filename of your own public key file if needed:

A typical public key value looks like this example:

If you copy and paste the contents of the public key file to use in the Azure portal or a Resource Manager template, make sure you don't copy any trailing whitespace. To copy a public key in macOS, you can pipe the public key file to pbcopy. Similarly in Linux, you can pipe the public key file to programs such as xclip.

The public key that you place on your Linux VM in Azure is by default stored in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub, unless you specified a different location when you created the key pair. To use the Azure CLI 2.0 to create your VM with an existing public key, specify the value and optionally the location of this public key using the az vm create command with the --ssh-key-values option. In the following command, replace VMname, RGname, and keyFile with your own values:

If you want to use multiple SSH keys with your VM, you can enter them in a space-separated list, like this --ssh-key-values sshkey-desktop.pub sshkey-laptop.pub.

SSH into your VM

With the public key deployed on your Azure VM, and the private key on your local system, SSH into your VM using the IP address or DNS name of your VM. In the following command, replace azureuser and myvm.westus.cloudapp.azure.com with the administrator user name and the fully qualified domain name (or IP address):

If you specified a passphrase when you created your key pair, enter that passphrase when prompted during the login process. The VM is added to your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file, and you won't be asked to connect again until either the public key on your Azure VM changes or the server name is removed from ~/.ssh/known_hosts.

If the VM is using the just-in-time access policy, you need to request access before you can connect to the VM. For more information about the just-in-time policy, see Manage virtual machine access using the just in time policy.

Next steps

• For more information on working with SSH key pairs, see Detailed steps to create and manage SSH key pairs.

• If you have difficulties with SSH connections to Azure VMs, see Troubleshoot SSH connections to an Azure Linux VM.

You can login to a remote Linux server without entering password in 3 simple steps using ssky-keygen and ssh-copy-id as explained in this article.

ssh-keygen creates the public and private keys. ssh-copy-id copies the local-host’s public key to the remote-host’s authorized_keys file. ssh-copy-id also assigns proper permission to the remote-host’s home, ~/.ssh, and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.

This article also explains 3 minor annoyances of using ssh-copy-id and how to use ssh-copy-id along with ssh-agent.

Step 1: Create public and private keys using ssh-key-gen on local-host

Change Private Key Password

Step 2: Copy the public key to remote-host using ssh-copy-id

Note: ssh-copy-id appends the keys to the remote-host’s .ssh/authorized_key.

Step 3: Login to remote-host without entering the password

The above 3 simple steps should get the job done in most cases.

We also discussed earlier in detail about performing SSH and SCP from openSSH to openSSH without entering password.

If you are using SSH2, we discussed earlier about performing SSH and SCP without password from SSH2 to SSH2 , from OpenSSH to SSH2 and from SSH2 to OpenSSH.

Generate Password Online

Using ssh-copy-id along with the ssh-add/ssh-agent

When no value is passed for the option -i and If ~/.ssh/identity.pub is not available, ssh-copy-id will display the following error message.

If you have loaded keys to the ssh-agent using the ssh-add, then ssh-copy-id will get the keys from the ssh-agent to copy to the remote-host. i.e, it copies the keys provided by ssh-add -L command to the remote-host, when you don’t pass option -i to the ssh-copy-id.

Three Minor Annoyances of ssh-copy-id

Following are few minor annoyances of the ssh-copy-id.

Openssl Change Private Key Password

1. Default public key: ssh-copy-id uses ~/.ssh/identity.pub as the default public key file (i.e when no value is passed to option -i). Instead, I wish it uses id_dsa.pub, or id_rsa.pub, or identity.pub as default keys. i.e If any one of them exist, it should copy that to the remote-host. If two or three of them exist, it should copy identity.pub as default.
2. The agent has no identities: When the ssh-agent is running and the ssh-add -L returns “The agent has no identities” (i.e no keys are added to the ssh-agent), the ssh-copy-id will still copy the message “The agent has no identities” to the remote-host’s authorized_keys entry.
3. Duplicate entry in authorized_keys: I wish ssh-copy-id validates duplicate entry on the remote-host’s authorized_keys. If you execute ssh-copy-id multiple times on the local-host, it will keep appending the same key on the remote-host’s authorized_keys file without checking for duplicates. Even with duplicate entries everything works as expected. But, I would like to have my authorized_keys file clutter free.

If you like this article, please bookmark it on Delicious and Stumble it.

One Time Password To Generate Private Key Mac

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like..

Next post: The Evolution and Future of Communication Technology

One Time Password To Generate Private Key Blockchain

Previous post: How To Manage Dell Servers using OMSA – OpenManage Server Administrator On Linux