Simple Key Manager

Simple Key Manager (SKM) is a small shell script designed to simplify common interactions with SSH keys.

This project is no longer maintained.

Maintaining multiple keys is a lot of work for very little benefit: if the main workstation is compromised, all of the keys on that workstation are compromised, so using multiple keys for a single identity (person, machine, workstation, etc) doesn't really provide any additional security benefits. The author recommends using a single key, and automating as much as possible to reduce or remove the need to ever connect directly to a remote host.

Specifically, the author recommends using a GPG authentication subkey, and letting gpg-agent act like ssh-agent. An example of this configuration can be viewed in the author's dotfiles, with various tutorials around the web. Feel free to reach out if you need help.

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The following content represents the README prior to deprecation.

Assumptions

By default, SKM makes a few assumptions about how your keys are stored. I'll list these below:

Key locations

1. Both public and private keys are stored in ~/.ssh/keys

Key naming scheme

SKM was designed with the idea of "grouped" keys. Often times, I find myself booting up one of my machines to ssh into few servers, or to work on a few specific projects -- before shutting down again.

Because of this, SKM supports adding keys to the agent one at a time, in groups, or all at once. "Groups" are created by naming your keyfiles with a common prefix. Look to the table below for an example.

Group Tag	Example private name	Example public name
vcs	vcs.github	vcs.github.pub
mytag	mytag.somekey	mytag.somekey.pub

Note that you do not need to follow this naming scheme if you do not want to take advantage of the grouping feature. You are free to name your keys whatever you wish, and skm add will handle it properly.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/bddenhartog/simple-key-manager

cd simple-key-manager

chmod u+x skm

ln -sf $(pwd)/skm /usr/bin/skm

You can replace /usr/bin in the last command with any directory in your PATH.

Usage

Now on to the easy bit. Review the table below and you're good to go!

Command	Example Parameters	Description
add	all | {group tags} | {keys}	Adds keys to the agent
disable	key1 key2 key3 ...	Disables keys
enable	key1 key2 key3 ...	Enables keys
export	key1 key2 key3 ...	Shows public key info
ls	none	Lists active keys
status	none	Shows the status of all keys
clear	none	Clears the authentication agent

Example actions

Command	Explanation
$ skm add all	Adds all keys in ~/.ssh/keys to the agent
$ skm add tagA tagB.keyname	Adds all tags prefixed with tagA and tagB.keyname
$ skm disable tagA.key1 tagA.key2	Disables tagA.key1 and tagA.key2
$ skm enable tagA.key2	Enables tagA.key2
$ skm export tagB.key3 tagA.key2 tagC.key4	Outputs the public key info for the specified keys

Contributing

Please create an issue for any bugs, feature requests, or other comments.

Thank you for checking out my project! I hope it's helpful!