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Gnome Keyring SSH Agent

Gnome Keyring includes an SSH agent which integrates with the gnome-keyring and user login for its passwords. It can also use the main PKCS#11 private key store.

Gnome Keyring will set the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable when it starts up.

Protocol Support

SSH agent protocol version 2 is supported and has proper integration with Gnome Keyring. This works with OpenSSH.

Version 1 of the SSH agent protocol is supported in compatibility mode. No integration with Gnome Keyring exists for keys loaded this way. SSH version 1 keys can loaded with ssh-add will work as expected.

Automatically loading SSH Keys

The SSH agent automatically loads files in ~/.ssh which have corresponding *.pub paired files. Additional SSH keys can be manually loaded and managed via the ssh-add command.

Disabling SSH agent support in GNOME Keyring

As a system distributor or a user, if you use another SSH agent (such as the ssh-agent included with OpenSSH), you may want to disable the SSH agent in GNOME Keyring to prevent ssh from using it instead of your preferred SSH agent.

There are several ways to disable the GNOME keyring SSH agent:

Using ssh-add with Gnome Keyring's SSH Agent

This assumes some familiarity with the ssh-add command. See its man page for more info.


2024-10-23 11:37