Account Security

Account Security

The best way to keep your account secure is to use strong passwords or even better use SSH keys to login rather than passwords. In either case you should not use a regular FTP client, use SFTP or SSH.

Creating a Strong Password

A great deal has been written on this. Basically you should:

1. use at least six characters, eight is a better minimum
2. use upper and lower case characters
3. use numbers and special characters

You should not

1. use names or words
2. use birthdays, pet’s names, name connected to you

SSH Keys

SSH and SFTP programs use public private key pairs to securely login into remote servers and to encrypt communications. Typically, RSA keys of 2048 bits or more are currently considered to be secure against cracking using current technology. Using a program like PuTTY on windows or ssh-keygen on Mac OS/X or Unix, you generate a public private key pair. The public key is added to the remote sever and then your private key is used to login. This has the added advantage of not having to remember a lot of passwords to log into different servers, you just need to remember the passphrase to use your private key.