Creating and managing keys for passwordless logins

The Secure Shell suite is a great set of tools for communication with remote servers. You can use the ssh component to remotely log in to the command line of a remote machine, and you can use either scp or sftp to securely transfer files. The default way to use any of these SSH components is to use the username of a person’s normal Linux user account. So, logging into a remote machine from the terminal of my openSUSE workstation would look something like this:

donnie@linux-0ro8:~> ssh donnie@192.168.0.8
donnie@192.168.0.8's password:

While it’s true that the username and password go across the network in an encrypted format, making it hard for malicious actors to intercept them, it’s still not the most secure way of doing business. The problem is that attackers have access to automated tools that can perform brute-force password attacks against an SSH server. Botnets, such as the Hail Mary Cloud...