By Mark Drake
Manager, Developer Education
Secure Shell — more commonly known as SSH — is a cryptographic network protocol that allows users to securely access one computer from another over an unsecured network.
SSH uses public-key cryptography to authenticate users and machines; a system administrator will add the public key of any user who must access a remote computer to a specific location in its filesystem. On Unix-like systems, authorized public keys are typically stored in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
file. Any user who presents a private SSH key that matches one of the public keys on the remote machine will be able to access it.
For more educational resources related to SSH, please visit our resources on How To Set Up SSH Keys and How To Use SFTP to Securely Transfer Files with a Remote Server.
Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.
Former Technical Writer at DigitalOcean. Focused on SysAdmin topics including Debian 11, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Databases, SQL and PostgreSQL.
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.
Full documentation for every DigitalOcean product.
The Wave has everything you need to know about building a business, from raising funding to marketing your product.
Stay up to date by signing up for DigitalOcean’s Infrastructure as a Newsletter.
New accounts only. By submitting your email you agree to our Privacy Policy
Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.
Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*
*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.