I generated a public/private key pair on my client machine. They are in ~/.ssh
as id_rsa
and id_rsa.pub
. I added the public key to the host machine's authorized_keys
file, and now I can successfully SSH without needing to type in a password.
Now, I moved my public key out of that folder mv ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub ~/
, and tried to SSH into the host machine again, expecting it to fail (since the public key is missing), but it still works! How come? How is it finding the public key if it's not in the ~/.ssh
directory (I tried moving it to different places besides the home folder too, and it still connects without password authentication successfully).