How to setup Shared Keys with SSH on Centos 5

I found this great article while trying to learn how to setup Shared SSH keys on Centos 5, Linux. It’s a great set by step tutorial provided by Shapeshed.

What are shared keys?

Shared Keys consist of a Public and Private key and allow a remote machine to authenticate a machine trying to connect it. The Private key resides on your machine and is used to identify you against the public key which resides on the machine you are trying to login to. You might think of it as a handshake. The remote machine has a description of what to expect from the handshake. It is unique to the client machine so if the handshake doesn’t match then the authentication will fail.

Why use shared keys?

Shared keys have two main benefits. Firstly they allow you to turn off password authentication. Malicious bots regularly crawl the web trying to login to servers using SSH. They have large dictionaries of passwords and try to get into your server using brute force attacks. You can limit this by having a strong password and changing the port that you use to login to SSH with. You can also completely turn off password authentication if you use shared keys. Shared keys mean that no one can access your server without the shared key.

Read the Full tutorial here:  Using Shared Keys with SSH on Centos 5 | Shape Shed.