Thursday 4 November 2021

SSH keys - removing passphrase

This is somewhat related to an old-but-good post: -

Using SSH without passwords OR pass phrases

A colleague had generated an SSH key pair using a command such as: -

ssh-keygen

which, by default, asks for, and applies, a passphrase to the generated private key.

This can sometimes get in the way of automated pipelines e.g. Git, Terraform etc. where there're repeated calls to the private key.

*IF* there's absolutely no good reason to use a passphrase - and there are for a lot of folks - the phrase can be removed thusly: -

ssh-keygen -p -P blahblah -N "" -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa

where "blahblah" is the old ( and unwanted passphrase ) and "" ( null ) is the new passphrase.

Easy when you know, how ?

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