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SSH Keys For Passwordless Entry

SSH Keys For Passwordless Entry

WARNING

Use this at your own risk.  We do not recomment this unless you have a reason.  If the machine you connect from is compromised in any way, the attacker can get into your CSE account.

NOTE

As of Aug 2018 DSA keys are no longer supported. If you have a SSH Key that is not RSA is may not work and you should recreate it as a RSA key.

Possible Reasons to use this:

  1. You are a TA and want to connect to your TA account without needing to remember the password.
  2. You teach a class and want to connect to the class account without needing to remember the password.
  3. If you co-teach a class and both want to share the class account without wanting the password.
  4. Batch or grid processing on our linux labs during idle times.

On the machine you want to connect from

  1. Run: ssh-keygen
    This will create a .ssh directory with a public and private key
  2. Verify the permissions on the id_rsa private key are private (-rw-------).
  3. Verify the permissions of your .ssh directory is world readable (chmod 755 .ssh)
  4. Verify the permissions on the is_rsa.pub public key are world readable (-rw-r--r-- , or chmod 644 id_rsa.pub)
  5. No other files in .ssh need to be world readable except id_rsa.pub

On the machine you are connecting to

  1. Create a file called authorized_keys2 in your .ssh directory that contains the contents ofyour id_rsa.pub
  2. Verify the permissions of authorized_keys2 is private (-rw------- , or chmod 600 authorized_keys2)
  3. Make sure there are no line feeds in this file.

If you are using this within the CSE systems, follow all the steps on arctic. 
The last step would be: cp id_rsa.pub authorized_keys

You can now connect to CSE systems without a password.