This article was posted as a follow up to the SCP and SSH article and covers the creation and distribution of SSH keys.

SSH Keys

SSH keys are public/private keys that are used to provide easier methods of authentication and 'single sign on' with SSH sessions. SSH attempts to use keys to authenticate where it can instead of using interactive password authentication. When used with an agent, you can enter your key's password once and SSH will then use that key to connect to all available servers. This is handy for using multitudes of commands from just logging into servers interactively via SSH, noninteractively for tunnelled applications or for disk mounts (e.g. sshfs) or through other applications (like Nautilus). If you are running an environment like GNOME, you can connect to its SSH Agent and run a script on login to ask for a password which will be retained for the rest of the session.