If you’re a DevOps engineer or a web developer, there’s a good chance that you’re already familiar and using the SSH key authentication on a dai

Upgrade Your SSH Key to Ed25519

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2021-06-22 07:30:09

If you’re a DevOps engineer or a web developer, there’s a good chance that you’re already familiar and using the SSH key authentication on a daily basis. Whether it’s for logging into the remote server or when pushing your commit to the remote repository. It provides us with better security than the traditional password-based authentication.

But, when is the last time you created or upgraded your SSH key? And did you use the latest recommended public-key algorithm? If it was more than five years ago and you generated your SSH key with the default options, you probably ended up using RSA algorithm with key-size less than 2048 bits long.

The Ed25519 was introduced on OpenSSH version 6.5. It’s the EdDSA implementation using the Twisted Edwards curve. It’s using elliptic curve cryptography that offers a better security with faster performance compared to DSA or ECDSA.

Today, the RSA is the most widely used public-key algorithm for SSH key. But compared to Ed25519, it’s slower and even considered not safe if it’s generated with the key smaller than 2048-bit length.

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