At the IBM conference in Berlin I realized that I have been preaching some ideas about (internet) security for a while. The gist of this idea is that security in the ‘world of computers’ (also referenced as the internet, on-line or -nowadays- clouds) is not all about technical solutions. In fact the most important component are not the technical implementations. Besides, these are pretty easy, although most people try to hide that.

Let me be clear and frank: implementing a secure computer system is hard, requires quite some knowledge, but so is programming a reasonable application or a corporate website as well. I think that putting a house or car together is even much harder. It is just another set of skills and you probably need specialized personnel to handle the security stuff for you. It is still a skill set most intelligent people could acquire.
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You probably hate all your passwords, just like me. I have tons of them and I use tools like 1Password and KeePass to store them relatively safe with a masterpassword. I also have a few strong passwords I reuse a little too often; like anybody does. However, I also have some smart passwords which are unique and easy to remember. Especially for websites. Without telling my exact method, I can tell you my formula to easy to remember unique passwords.

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One of the most convenient ways to login to a server with SSH, is with certificates. Although the principle is pretty well documented all over the internet, I still found some issues setting it up myself from my Windows laptop, hence this walk through.

I have tried to make a simple, condensed walk through. It does require that you know what SSH is and how to use PuTTY.

(I also created a Mac OSX walk through)
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