TOPIC: OPENSSH
Automated entry of SSH passwords
17th February 2022A useful feature for shell scripting is automatic password entry when logging into other servers. This often involves plain text files, which are not secure. Fortunately, I found an alternative. The first step is to use the keygen tool included with SSH. The command is shown below. The -t switch defines the key type, RSA in this example. You can add a passphrase, but I chose not to for convenience. You should evaluate your security requirements before implementing this approach.
ssh-keygen -t rsa
The next step is to use the ssh-copy-id command to generate the keys for a set of login credentials. For this, it is better to use a user account with restricted access to keep as much server security as you can. Otherwise, the process is as simple as executing a command like the following and entering the password at the prompt for doing so.
ssh-copy-id [user ID]@[server address]
Getting this set up has been useful for running a file upload script to keep a web server synchronised, and it is better to have the credentials encrypted rather than kept in a plain text file.