No one likes typing passwords. If people had their way, computers would simply know who they were and what they should have access to without us proving it at every turn. In my last article I showed you how to create SSH Identities/Pubkeys, which can be used as an alternative to password authentication. However, I then went right back and told you to passphrase protect them, so now you were substituting one password for another, seemingly gaining nothing.

This week we have the payoff. We'll take the Identity/Pubkey trust we created last time, and learn how to use the ssh-agent program as our keymaster. We'll decrypt our keys once, put them in into the agent, and have it handle all our authentication needs thereafter.

By Brian Hatch at SecurityFocus.

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