GPG key to authenticate to SSH?

Jeroen Budts jeroen at budts.be
Sun Jul 29 21:39:08 CEST 2012


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On 07/25/2012 12:04 PM, Werner Koch wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Jul 2012 22:04, jeroen at budts.be said:
> 
>> apparently they didn't work. Now I completely disabled 'Launch
>> GNOME services on startup' in XFCE so gnome-keyring is not
>> started anymore. Now I get the correct output from the above
>> command.
> 
> Please complain on the xfce and gnome lists and tell them they
> should stop hijacking gpg-agent - at least by default.

In fact I think for most users their ssh-agent implementation is
rather nice. It completely removes the need to manually use ssh-add
and just makes it work out-of-the-box. That they also implement
gpg-agent similarly seems logical to give the user the exact same
user-experience.
Under XFCE the GNOME services are disabled by default, but comming
from GNOME enabled them when I switched to XFCE (running away from
GNOME 3)

>> What I really wanted to accomplish here is to use my GPG 
>> authentication subkey for SSH authentication, without having to
>> use an SSH-key at all. But it is still not clear to me how this
>> can be accomplished, if possible at all?
> 
> With 2.1-betaX it is easy to do.  With older version you need
> probably need to use gpgkey2ssh.  But the latter is not weel
> documented and frankly I have not used it at all.

That seems very easy and interesting indeed. I understand now how to
enable a GPG key for SSH with gpg-agent 2.1. What I do not yet
understand is how would add your public key to the authorized_keys
file on the server? Wouldn't the gpgkey2ssh-script still be needed for
this? Or can gnupg output the public key in the correct format?

Oh and one other small question: what exactly is a 'keygrip'? Why
aren't the regular key-ids used for this?

thanks for your help!
Jeroen


- -- 
website: http://budts.be/ - twitter: @teranex
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