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A comment on Ask HN: What are the best practises for using SSH keys?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What are the best practises for using SSH keys? by regecks on Sunday September 25, 2016 @08:41AM (#12575087)
> OTOH, it's defense in depth

Yup. IMO not using a passphrase is nuts, considering there is practically no convenience loss (ssh-agent, OS X keychain, pageant) and fairly significant benefit. Protects against:

- accidentally exposing the private key (it happens, accidental wildcard in the shell), and

- attacks that aren't after your keys specifically, e.g. your home directory gets stolen.

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Re:Ask HN: What are the best practises for using SSH keys? by eropple on Sunday September 25, 2016 @04:43PM (#12577318)
In general I agree with you, with the caveat that there are a number of products that don't give a toss about security (lookin' at you, Hashicorp) that actually and unironically require you to have your keys unencrypted on disk.

I have since discarded these products (and others should too), but they do exist.

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