Setting up public key authentication for a user account

1. To setup public key authentication for your user account, make sure you are logged into shell and remove the .ssh directory if it exists by executing the following command: rm -r -f ~/.ssh. This will remove the current public and private keypair if any, to ensure that they don't interfere with the ones we are going to create.
2. Create a new private/public rsa keypair by executing the following command: ssh-keygen and make sure that you save the keys inside the .ssh directory (the command will automatically create the directory if it's not found). Example:
   
   

   [ricardo@linuxshell ~]$ ssh-keygen
   
   Generating public/private rsa key pair.
   Enter file in which to save the key (/home/ricardo/.ssh/id_rsa):
   Created directory '/home/ricardo/.ssh'.
   Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
   Enter same passphrase again:
   Your identification has been saved in /home/ricardo/.ssh/id_rsa.
   Your public key has been saved in /home/ricardo/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
   

   
   
   Remark The public/private rsa keypair will be saved into the .ssh directory if you leave their location field blank.
3. Rename the generated public key to authorized_keys to tell the system to use this public key to validate future public key authentications. To do this, execute the following command assuming that id_rsa.pub is the name of the public key: mv ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
4. Download the generated private key (/home/ricardo/.ssh/id_rsa in the above example) using SFTP and use it to login using public key authentication
   
   
   Notice that You may be asked to enter a passphrase if you have provided one while creating the private key.

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