by Nezar Assawiel

1. Download Key Generated In Google Ssh Download
2. Ssh Key Generate
3. Google Cloud Ssh Key
4. Download Key Generated In Google Ssh Windows 10

Mar 31, 2020 This guide shows you how to control access to Linux instances by manually creating SSH keys and editing public SSH key metadata. To check whether managing SSH keys in metadata is the best choice for your use case, review Choosing an access method. How do I generate SSH keys on a Google compute engine windows instance. Ask Question. I could not get the SSL keys generated by GCE to be automatically transferred to the Windows server instance as happens with a Linux instance. To resolve the need to have the GCE and Windows keys the same I created the key on the windows system and copied. Aug 10, 2015 Teams. Q&A for Work. Stack Overflow for Teams is a private, secure spot for you and your coworkers to find and share information. I think you're saying that when a new instance is created there are no ssh keys? And I can't create ssh keys in the conventional manner that I would for a CentOS server. Instead I have to create the ssh keys using the Google tool glcoud. But once created, I can ssh to the instance normally (i.e. Without gcloud or the the web-based ssh). Creating and Uploading an SSH Key. To SSH into an instance using your own terminal (as opposed to the Google Cloud Platform console), you must generate and upload an SSH key. Generate an SSH key using the following command: $ ssh-keygen -f /.ssh/mygcpkeyname-t rsa. This generates a public/private key pair. In the Compute Engine menu, click. This page contains download links for the latest released version of PuTTY. Currently this is 0.73, released on 2019-09-29. When new releases come out, this page will update to contain the latest, so this is a good page to bookmark or link to.

Google Cloud offers many tools and services. One of these services is creating highly customizable virtual machines. If you are not familiar with what a virtual machine is, here is a definition from Microsoft:

A virtual machine is a computer file, typically called an image, that behaves like an actual computer. In other words, creating a computer within a computer. It runs in a window, much like any other program, giving the end user the same experience on a virtual machine as they would have on the host operating system itself. The virtual machine is sandboxed from the rest of the system, meaning that the software inside a virtual machine can’t escape or tamper with the computer itself.

Select SSH keys from the menu at the top; Click Edit and click in the ssh key field of the user key you wish to edit (usually the one corresponding to the a user on the Windows instance). If there are no keys you will have to click the plus sing to add a new user/key combination. Make a note of the email address at the end of the existing key.

Virtual machines are needed in many situations to test applications against other operating systems, to access virus-infected data, or to experiment with other operating systems. You can install virtual machines on your computer. You can also create them in the cloud and simply connect to them.

Download Key Generated In Google Ssh Download

In this tutorial, I will walk you through how to create a virtual machine in Google Cloud. We can connect to it with SSH from your computer.

1. If you don’t have one already, create a Google Cloud account from here.

You will get $300 credit to play around with for a year! It is more than enough to learn and play with everything Google Cloud offers.

2.Create a new project or use an existing one. You can create a new project called project1, for example, as in the following gif:

3. Now you are set to create a virtual machine. Go to the top left corner of your Google Cloud home page, click on the triple bar icon ≡ and select Compute Engine ->VM instance and click Create.

Enter whatever name you want in the Name field as shown below:

Keep the default region and zone. Any region/zone will do for this tutorial. If you are curious about what they mean, you can read Google Cloud’s documentation about them here.

You can keep default machine type or click Customize toselect the number of CPU cores, memory, and GPUs you would like your virtual machine to have. You will see the cost on the right side changes!

For your first experiments with Google Cloud, you can be conservative with the $300 credit for some actual work. In such a case, you can choose the following configuration:

Next choose a boot disk. For example, you can choose 20 GB, SSD, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as shown below:

Then set the Service Account under Identity and API access to No service account as shown below:

Finally, go to the Security tab under Firewall. You will see an SSH Key field as shown below:

This where you are going to connect your computer to the virtual machine using your SSH Key!

If you are not familiar with SSH (Secure Shell) and why you may want to use it, it is a network protocol that provides encrypted data communication between two computers (your computer and Google’s servers, in this case) which are connected over an insecure network (the Internet here).

To establish an SSH connection, you may need an application that can do that, depending on your operating system. Follow the rest of this post depending on your operating system (Windows or Mac/Linux).

Windows

I recommend PuTTY. It is an open-source and easy to use SSH client. You can download PuTTY and install it from here.

After installing PuTTY, open PuTTY Key Generator and click create. It will generate a random key by you moving the mouse over the blank area. After it is done, you will get something like this:

Change the key comment field to something recognizable and easy to type, as this will become a user name later!

Then save both the public and private keys by clicking the corresponding icons shown in the picture above.

Highlight the whole Key field from the PuTTY Key Generator, and copy and paste it in the key data field in Google Cloud:

Click create and wait for the virtual machine instance to be created.

In the meantime, you can go to PuTTY. Go to SSH ->Auth and browse for the private key file that you saved.

Next, go to Google Cloud and copy the external IP from the virtual machine instance that you just created as shown below:

And paste it on the Host field under Sessions in PuTTY and hit Enter:

Note: you might get an error message. Ignore it and click yes. (It just says the key is not already in the registry. Are you sure you want to connect?)

Then enter the username you created when generating the key (key comment above). Boom! you are in the virtual machine that you just created.

You can install python and Google APIs on it, for example, to start making some magic! Don’t forget to shut it down in Google Cloud after you are done to be economic with your credit :)

Mac/Linux

Mac and Linux support SSH connection natively. You just need to generate an SSH key pair (public key/private key) to connect securely to the virtual machine.

The private key is equivalent to a password. Thus, it is kept private, residing on your computer, and should not be shared with any entity. The public key is shared with the computer or server to which you want to establish the connection. To generate the SSH key pair to connect securely to the virtual machine, follow these steps:

Enter the following command in Terminal: ssh-keygen -t rsa . It will start the key generation process. You will be prompted to choose the location to store the SSH key pair. Press ENTER to accept the default location as shown below:

Next, choose a password for your login to the virtual machine or hit ENTER if you wish not to use a password. The private key (i.e. identification) and the public key will be generated as shown below:

Now run the following command: cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub . It will display the public key in the terminal as shown below. Highlight and copy this key:

and paste it in the SSH key field in Google Cloud and hit Create:

Now you can use the External IP of the virtual machine you just created:

to ssh to it as follows:

You will get “The authenticity of host…etc.” warning as shown in the picture below. This is normal. Whenever SSH connects to a system it hasn’t seen before, it will generate a warning like this. Reply yes to connect, and bingo!You are in the virtual machine, as you can see from host name instance-3. To exit the virtual machine, just type exit.

Don’t forget to shut the virtual machine in Google Cloud after you are done to save that $300 credit!

Originally published at assawiel.com/blog on December 23, 2017. Updated: Oct 10, 2018

Updated on March 30, 2020

Spend enough time in an IT environment and you will likely come across the term SSH keys. If you’ve already come across this IT term, then you might find yourself wondering, what are SSH keys? SSH (Secure Shell) keys are an access credential that is used in the SSH protocol.

Read the rest of this post to learn more about what are SSH keys or consider watching webinar below to find out more about the SSH protocol and the basics of SSH authentication.

Before this post delves into an explanation on what are SSH keys, let’s take a quick look at the SSH protocol.

The SSH Protocol

Ssh Key Generate

The first version of the SSH protocol was developed in the summer of 1995 by Tatu Ylonen. Tatu was a researcher at the University of Helsinki when a sniffing attack was discovered on the university network. A sniffing attack intercepts and logs the traffic that takes place on a network, and can provide attackers with usernames and passwords which can then be used to gain access to critical IT assets. Thousands of credentials were impacted, including those belonging to community partnerships. This sniffing attack motivated Tatu to figure out how to make networks more secure, and this ultimately led to the creation of the SSH protocol (SSH.com).

Today, the SSH protocol is widely used to login remotely from one system into another, and its strong encryption makes it ideal to carry out tasks such as issuing remote commands and remotely managing network infrastructure and other vital system components. To use the SSH protocol, a couple pieces of software need to be installed. The remote systems need to have a piece of software called an SSH daemon, and the system used to issue commands and manage the remote servers needs to have a piece of software called the SSH client. These pieces of software are necessary to create a proper communication channel using the SSH protocol (DigitalOcean).

Essentially, SSH keys are an authentication method used to gain access to this encrypted connection between systems.

What are SSH keys?

SSH keys come in many sizes, but a popular choice is RSA 2048-bit encryption, which is comparative to a 617 digit long password. On Windows systems, it is possible to generate your own SSH key pair by downloading and using an SSH client like PuTTY. On Mac® and Linux® systems, it is possible to generate an SSH key pair using a terminal window. Watch the video below to find out how to generate your own RSA key pair on Mac and Linux.

SSH keys always come in pairs, and each pair is made up of a private key and a public key. Who or what possesses these keys determines the type of SSH key pair. If the private key and the public key remain with the user, this set of SSH keys is referred to as user keys. If the private and public key are on a remote system, then this key pair is referred to as host keys. Another type of SSH key is a session key. When a large amount of data is being transmitted, session keys are used to encrypt this information.

Now let’s take a closer look at how a private key and public key work. To keep things simple, we will focus on how user keys work.

How User Keys Work

In a user key set, the private key remains on the system being used to access the remote system and is used to decrypt information that is exchanged in the SSH protocol. Private keys should never be shared with anyone. A public key is used to encrypt information, can be shared, and is used by the user and the remote server. On the server end, the public key is saved in a file that contains a list of authorized public keys. On the user’s side, the public SSH key is stored in an SSH key management software or in a file on their computer.

Using SSH Keys

First Steps

Google Cloud Ssh Key

Before you can start using SSH keys, first you need to generate your own SSH key pair on the system you would like to use to access a remote system. This article and the video mentioned above are great resources that can guide you through on how to generate an SSH key pair. Once the key pair is generated, the next step is to put the public SSH key on the remote server. Depending on your setup, this can be done by entering a couple commands in the terminal window, using JumpCloud, or by manually placing the public SSH key on the remote server (DigitalOcean).

Behind the Scenes of SSH Key Authentication

After completing the steps mentioned above, use your terminal to enter in your ssh username and the IP address of the remote system in this format: ssh username@my_ip_address. This will initiate a connection to the remote system using the SSH protocol. The protocol and specified username will then tell the remote server which public key to use to authenticate you. Then the remote server will use that public key to encrypt a random challenge message that is sent back to the client. This challenge message is decrypted using the private key on your system. Once the message is decrypted, it is combined with a previously arranged session ID and then sent back to the server. If the message matches with what the server sent out, the client is authenticated, and you will gain access to the remote server. This process proves to the server that you have the corresponding private key to the public key it has on file.

However, the security that this authentication process provides can be undermined when SSH keys are not properly managed.

Managing SSH Keys

It is imperative that proper SSH key management is in place because they often grant access to mission-critical digital assets. Also, companies tend to have a lot of SSH keys. In fact, Fortune 500 companies will often have several millions of these. Despite the difficulty in trying to manually manage millions of SSH keys, having an SSH key management system in place is continuously overlooked. SSH.com did some digging and discovered a company that had 3 million SSH keys “that granted access to live production servers. Of those, 90% were no longer used. Root access was granted by 10% of the keys, ” (SSH.com). An effective SSH key management system in place would have gone a long way in reducing this concerning security risk.

IT has a couple options to gain control over SSH keys in their environment. One of these includes using an SSH key management tool. However, this means having to manage one more platform in addition to managing an SSO provider, a directory service, and maybe a system management solution. A new solution has emerged that is providing IT with a second option: Directory-as-a-Service®.

Cloud IAM offers SSH Key Management

Download Key Generated In Google Ssh Windows 10

This cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) solution provides IT with one central place to manage SSH keys. Furthermore, IT can also centralize user authentication to Mac, Linux, and Windows systems, cloud servers, wired and WiFi networks, web-based and on-prem applications, and virtual and on-prem storage. With one central place to manage a user’s authentication to all of their resources, it becomes a simple matter of a few clicks to deprovision users from all of their resources, including SSH key access to remote systems.

Learn More about SSH Key Management with JumpCloud

For more information, consider reading this support article on how JumpCloud assists with SSH key management, or exploring this guide for a modern approach to managing user accounts on your cloud servers.
You are also more than welcome to reach out to us if you would like more information on how DaaS can simplify your SSH key management. If you’re ready to start testing our modern IAM platform, sign up for a free account. You’ll be able to explore all of our features, and your first ten users are free forever.