Do I need to have a passphrase for my SSH RSA key?
Problem
Before I started at my current job (at a small business), my office had no firewall on the network and literally nothing was ever being backed up. Now that I've signed on as a dedicated sysadmin / one-man-IT-department, I've been doing what I can to change this. After explaining to my boss how vulnerable we were, he's allowed me to set up some backup servers, one of which is at his house. Right now, I'm trying to get everything set so that I can automate daily backups. I am planning to use rsync through ssh to do this. For security's sake as well as for ease of automation, I was planning to disable ssh password login and only use rsa key validation. Well, if I have an rsa passphrase set, then I would still have to enter a passsword, and that's a problem. Does not having an rsa passphrase make things significantly less secure? I'm the only person in the company who has any sort of a clue about this kind of thing, so I'm not too worried about someone calling up a terminal on my machine …
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1 Fix
Fix for: Do I need to have a passphrase for my SSH RSA key?
As you know, the advantage that the passphrase gives you is that if someone is able to read your private key, they are 'unable' to use it. If someone is able to access that private key, you should take it for granted that they have access(ed)/compromised whatever machines are set up with the public key. Things like .bash_history or .ssh/config only make this easier, even if your .ssh/known_hosts is obfuscated. Not having a password on your key isn't the end of the world, here are 3 ideas to try…
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