Public key authentication is an alternative means of identifying yourself to your FREESCO, instead of typing a password. It is more secure and more flexible, but also more difficult to set up.

What you need to do is to create a public key in the users HOME directory. So for the user “root” you would create /home/root/.ssh/ and then put the authorized_keys file in that directory. I personally use this feature on all of my own systems so it definately does work fine in FREESCO and it is easy to create a private key using the (FREE) windows tool puttygen to put into FREESCO.

mkdir  /home/root/.ssh
:>/home/root/.ssh/authorized_keys
chown -R root.root  /home/root/.ssh
chmod 700 /home/root/.ssh
chmod 700 /home/root/.ssh/authorized_keys

You then use the Windows puttygen to create a private key with just the default settings and save it to a file. It also will have a section for copying into the authorized_ keys. This can be done VERY easy by just highlighting it ¹⁾and then copy.

At that point if you have a version of “mc” installed on the router just open an SSH session to the router²⁾ and start mc. You then can edit the /home/root/.ssh/authorized_keys file and in the PuTTy window you can right click your mouse which will paste the key into the file. Then save it in mc and exit the session. Actually if you don't have mc installed you can use your favorite FREESCO editor to paste the key into /home/root/.ssh/authorized_keys file, even the default editor will do.

Then configure PuTTY to use the saved private key in it's session configuration and use the username “root” and save the session. From this point on all you have to do is to double click the link in PuTTy and you will be logged in as root automatically. The same procedure can be done for ANY user except you have to change the ownership of the .shh directory and the authorized_keys file to that user.