Do you use SSH to log in to a remote server? If so, do you type your password in every time you log in? Did you know that you don’t have to?
In addition to being more convenient, public key authentication is also more secure since your password is not transmitted over the network. It’s also relatively quick and easy to set up, and I hope the following information will be helpful in that regard.
With SSH public key authentication, instead of using your password to authenticate, it will instead use your public key. Of course the public key is only half of the solution, the other half is your private key. These two keys work together, so that a message encrypted using your public key can only be decrypted with your private key. It is important to remember that you can freely distribute your public key but you must never give your private key to anyone.