FAQ's

How secure is ShareTool?

ShareTool is extremely secure. ShareTool strongly encrypts all data to and from your home network. It also confirms the identity of your home machine to prevent “man in the middle” attacks.

ShareTool uses OS X's built-in copy of OpenSSH. By default, this means AES-128 encryption. You can modify your SSH configuration to use AES-256 but ShareTool doesn't make any changes automatically.

AES has been adopted by the U.S. government as an encryption standard and is in use all over the world.

Secure Shell or SSH is a network protocol that allows data to be exchanged using a secure channel between two networked devices.

PKI (public and private keys) is also supported but not required. You can disable password login for SSH and ShareTool will still work fine. If you store your private key files in a non-standard location, you can tell ShareTool where they are via the Preferences window.

How do I disable password login for SSH?

There's no built-in Mac OS X interface for disabling password login. Removing a user from the list in the Sharing preference pane will disable login altogether.

To force public/private key authentication, you need to turn off the "PasswordAuthentication" setting in the SSH configuration file. You can read more about this by typing in "man sshd_config" in Terminal.

There's also a "SSH Helper" tool that makes it easier:
http://www.gideonsoftworks.com/sshhelper.html

Note that as long as your password is secure, it's really not necessary to disable password login.