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SSH Keys

SSH keys provide a secure way to remotely access your CORE Linux virtual machines.

When a machine is created, the 'paperspace' user is provisioned. While one could authenticate using a password, it is safer to use public keys. If you are already familiar with public SSH keys, how they work, and already have one generated ready to use, feel free to skip to How to generate an SSH key section.

How SSH Keys work​

Since both the input and output of commands sent over a public (or private) network may contain sensitive information, cryptography is used to secure the transmission of data. All forms of communications between computers over a network, including the cryptography, begins with a handshake. With Secure Shell (SSH), keys are split into two parts: public and private.

By storing our public key on the remote machine we wish to access and keeping the private key on the local machine used to do the accessing, we introduce the ability to authenticate without having to remember passwords. While SSH implementations may vary between Windows and Unix (Linux/macOS), public keys usually contain the ssh- prefix while private keys start with the header:

-----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----

Generating an SSH key​

  1. Open up your terminal
  2. Run the following command:
ssh-keygen
  1. Print out your public key with
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Adding SSH Keys​

You can add SSH keys on the SSH Keys page in the console. Specify a name for the key and copy/paste the output from step 3 of key generation. Once you’ve added a key, you can select it during machinecreation to automatically add it to new CORE machines.

Enter a name and your code and click add.

Deleting SSH Keys​

You can delete your SSH keys on the SSH Keys page in the console.

Just find the key and click delete.

note

Deleting your SSH key from the console or removing an accessor from a machine does not remove the SSH key from the machine. The key will need to be manually removed on the machine from ~/.ssh/authorized_keys