About Authentication

By embedding the Navionics SDK in your app, you gain, among the others, the capability to interact with Navionics Services to send and receive data; an asymmetric cryptography algorithm is used to establish a reliable and secure communication channel.
The interested reader can find additional information about public/private key cryptography on this Wikipedia page.

How to generate the SSH Key and link to your account

As a Navionics Developer you are requested to generate an ssh key-pair and add the public key to your account, keeping the private one safe and secure. Below a short video and the main steps to perform

Step A: Generating an SSH key-pair

The cryptographic algorithm used is based on 4096 bits RSA keys in RSA encoded in PEM format.
To generate a key pair use the following CLI command:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096

and follow the instructions, at the end of the process you’ll have two files saved on the path of your choice, one for the private key (typically id_rsa) and one for the public key (typically id_rsa.pub).

Step B: Encode SSH key in PEM format

To encode your public key in PEM format, issue the following:

$ ssh-keygen -f id_rsa.pub -e -m pem > id_rsa.pem

Step C: Adding the SSH public key to your account

From the “Developers Console”, open the page  “Your Account” and click on the “New SSH Key” button; you can then assign a mnemonic name to your key and copy and paste the contents of the .pem file into the “Public Signature” field.