jakob / jakob/Postico

Use SSH Agent

Open
#533 17 comments 9 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Dominant language
Python
Stars
486
Forks
8
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

My setup is like this: my (encrypted) private key is stored in `~/.ssh/id_rsa`. The passphrase for this key is stored in Keychain. The agent is launched automatically by the system, the key is inserted automatically. [[Docs](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/technotes/tn2449/_index.html)] It would be great if Postico would just use the agent instead of trying to load the encrypted key from disk.

Benefits:

- Security: Only the OS (access group com.apple.ssh.passphrases) can access the passphrase of the private key.
- Ease of use: Other tools (e.g. ssh, rsync, git, Cyberduck, Sequel Pro, [basically any other tool that I use], and soon Postico?) "just work" because they use the agent, no need to set path to private key or anything.

[libssh2 already supports this](https://www.libssh2.org/examples/ssh2_agent.html) so it shouldn't be hard to implement.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Research direction

Start with the Apple TN2449 documentation and the libssh2 SSH agent example linked in the issue, then locate Postico's existing encrypted-key loading path. Done means Postico can use the system SSH agent without loading the encrypted private key from disk, while preserving the existing connection flow.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
macos
Domain
authentication, security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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