Your details

Two things on the dashboard are yours alone: the IP address you connect from, and your SSH public keys. Client environments use these to let you through — a bastion host that only accepts connections from known addresses, or a server that trusts your key.

Nobody else can read or change either of them. That isn't a policy, it's enforced: the credentials your browser holds are scoped to your own email address, so a request for somebody else's IP or keys is refused by AWS before it reaches any of GateKeeper's code.

IP whitelist

The IP whitelist panel holds one address — the one you connect to the internet from.

Update it when it changes: a new office, a home connection that's been reassigned, switching VPN. If something that worked yesterday is now timing out or hanging rather than refusing you, a changed IP is the usual culprit.

Your address isn't detected automatically, so if you're unsure what to put, search for "what is my IP" and use what it reports. Make sure any VPN is in the state you'll actually be working in — the address you have with the VPN on is a different one.

SSH keys

The SSH keys panel holds your public keys, one per entry, and you can have several — a laptop and a desktop, say.

Add the public half only. That's the short file ending in .pub, and its contents start with ssh-ed25519 or ssh-rsa. Your private key — the file with no extension, or one ending .pem — never leaves your machine and should never be pasted into anything, GateKeeper included.

If you don't have a key yet:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "you@gcdtech.com"

Accept the default location, set a passphrase, then paste the contents of ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub.

Remove keys for machines you no longer use. A key you can't account for is worth raising rather than quietly deleting.

When changes take effect

Both are stored immediately, but they don't reach client environments on their own — something downstream reads them, on its own schedule. If access hasn't started working after a few minutes, that's worth asking about rather than repeatedly re-saving.