Secure SHell (SSH) keys are essentially the use of manually generating a public-private key pair to perform the authentication. This allows users or programs to log in without having to specify a password.

More information can be found here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Shell

• Public key (pubkey or SSH key) are more secure than password-only login,
• It does not require the end user to remember their password in order to login,
• It is not mandatory to use this feature but is recommended if you are conscious over security.

For now, this page acts as a placeholder. Depending on your device, you may wish to refer to the following websites for more information on how to set it up.

https://devops.ionos.com/tutorials/use-ssh-keys-with-putty-on-windows/

https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/creating-ssh-keys-776639788.html

https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Remote_Access#Setting_up_public_key_authentication

• The long story short with this guide is that you will ideally need to generate the SSH keys on your computer first.

We accept RSA, ecdsa and ed25519 keys. In case you are wondering, ed25519 appears to be the most robust algorithm, followed by ecdsa and then RSA.

$ ssh-keygen -t ed25519
Generating public/private ed25519 key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key ($HOME/.ssh/ed25519): [enter] or specify where you want to store both keys
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in $HOME/.ssh/ed25519.
Your public key has been saved in $HOME/.ssh/.ssh/ed25519.

$ ssh-copyid $HOME/.ssh/ed25519.pub youruser@shell.ircnow.org

$ ssh -i $HOME/.ssh/ed25519.pub youruser@shell.ircnow.org

$ vi $HOME/.ssh/config
Host shell
        HostName shell.ircnow.org
        User     youruser
        Port     22
        IdentityFile $HOME/.ssh/ed25519

Congratulations. You may now login to our shell by simply running:

$ ssh shell