Public Key Authentication

Simple way to stop people trying to brute force your accounts over ssh - disable passwords.

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa - b 2048

For best results you should provide a password for your key, then if anyone gets hold of it they won't be able to use it.

This will generate a 2048 bit RSA certificate. The public key will be in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and the private key will be in ~/.ssh/id_rsa. Be very very careful with the private key, don't let anyone near it.

Copy the public key to every system you want to be able to log in to. It's per-user, so for the user account that you want to log in as, add it to the authorized_keys file in the user's .ssh folder in it's home directory.