In cryptography, a pre-shared key (PSK) is a shared secret which can be used to securely authenticate to an application system or service between one or more authorised parties. This can be during the login process to a WIFI network, or logging in to a cloud hosted server on AWS using a keypair.psk file and more.

Pre-shared keys are basically passwords or encryption keys that are entered into both sides of two end points ahead of time. Pre-shared keys (PSK) are typed into the clients and servers (authentication servers, access points, etc.) or entered via USB, CD-ROM or smart card. Each end point can then encrypt and decrypt data using the pre-shared key (PSK) thereby allowing communications to be private and secure.

In this tutorial you will learn 4 basic ways of generating secure pre-shared keys on Linux Ubuntu 20.04 LTS using any of the 4 commands listed below:

1) openssl rand -base64 64
2) gpg –gen-random 2 70 | base64
3) head -c 35 /dev/random | base64
4) date | sha256sum | base64 | head -c 60; echo.