OpenSSH key management
Most authentication in Windows environments is done with a username-password pair, which works well for systems that share a common domain. When working across domains, such as between on-premises and cloud-hosted systems, it becomes vulnerable to brute force intrusions. By comparison, Linux environments commonly use public-key/private-key pairs to drive authentication which doesn't require the use of guessable passwords. OpenSSH includes tools to help support this, specifically: ssh-keygen for generating secure keys ssh-agent and ssh-add for securely storing private keys scp and sftp to securely copy public key files during initial use of a server About key pairs Key pairs refer to the public and private key files that are used by certain authentication protocols. SSH public key authentication uses asymmetric cryptographic algorithms to generate two key files – one "private" and the other "public". The private key files are the equivalen...