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Comment by eptcyka

5 months ago

In what scenario would you prefer to backup an SSH key in favor of generating new SSH keys?

When I have my pub key in the authorized_keys files of many machines, especially machines where I don't control the authorized_keys file.

  • In this case you can maintain an offline SSH CA and trust that on the remote machines, and then sign yourself leaf certificates against a non-exportable HSM-backed key. In case of loss you just make a new key and sign a new certificate.

    Of course this just moves the key management problem somewhere else: now you need to protect the CA key, but that might be easier since you would only need access to it in a disaster recovery scenario if you replaced the laptop or otherwise lost access to your HSM-backed key.

    As usual, it all depends on your threat model.