Enhancement of SSH Authentication by Public Key Cryptography

Abstract

Remote access is the ability of users/system administrators to access their public and non-public computing resources from external location using the public network (internet), several systems could be used to facilitate this service such as Secure Shell (SSH). As general, such systems available publicly by default regarding to its nature, therefore in this study we use public key as replacement of passwords in SSH authentication to overcome any expected unauthorized access to our service. The proposed solution in this study consists of remote access server, remote access client, and certificate authority to make sure that public key is the right one, we added an option in CA of which cryptography algorithm to use for data, using this replacement of public key will lead to better and faster authentication than using passwords, as shown in this research, we used just RSA algorithm for encryption, but we recommend to use other algorithms as options in CA form, and also make this program of ours as a service in Linux kernel.