Hi! If you are reading this in a web browser you are at the URL for a github repository or a gitlab project.
If you are not familiar with git please see the first tutorial in this series. This tutorial will show you how to upload your SSH key to a repository server.
SSH (secure shell) is one of the methods used to remotely access *nix computers and it is one of the options available from most repository hosts to provide encryption.
Symmetric key are used by SSH in order to encrypt the entire connection. The public/private key pairs that are generated by you are used for authentication (not encryption) The idea behind a public/private key encryption is that anyone with the public key can encrypt data which can then ONLY be read by the person with the private key. So that is used for authentication. The key that is used to encrypt is created through an exchange between the client and server. Both contribute to the creation of the unique secret key for the session.
For more information read this tutorial: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/understanding-the-ssh-encryption-and-connection-process
Before we proceed you must have an ssh key on your local host, to generate a key see the instructions here Once you have a key or if you previously generated a key, read on.
When you generated your key ssh-keygen created a directory structure as follows
Note: this will be in /h on the lab computers, it will be elsewhere on your home computer.
$ ls -l .ssh/
total 9
-rw-r--r-- 1 owner 197121 1679 Nov 29 2016 id_rsa
-rw-r--r-- 1 owner 197121 403 Nov 29 2016 id_rsa.pub
-rw-r--r-- 1 owner 197121 1163 Aug 11 17:04 known_hosts
Never share your private key (id_rsa) you need to copy the content of your public key into the clipboard as follows in git-bash:
# copy your public key to the clipboard
cat ./ssh/id_rsa.pub | clip
Logon to your git repo server (github/gitlab etc) and follow the appropriate instructions