Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Easier Shared Key Authentication

I use ssh shared key authentication to access a good number of servers I work on. In an effort to make things more secure, the shared keys usually have passwords associated with them. Generally speaking, I try to keep remote sessions alive inside of screen or just minimized on my current workspace, but I'm a habitual window closer, so I end up having to login again pretty regularly. Luckily, openssh has a facility that saves me from typing my passwords over and over again. I keep all my keys inside /home/myuser/.ssh for convenience sake. When I start my desktop session, I cd into that directory and do ssh-add *. It prompts me to type each distinct password once, and that's it. After that, the ssh agent has the password stored in memory until I terminate my desktop session.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since you use ssh with screen... you might be interested in how to forward ssh-agent through screen.

http://www.jukie.net/~bart/blog/screen-with-ssh-and-x

Travis Whitton said...

Very interesting stuff. Thanks for the info.