Seahorse
Seahorse is a GNOME application for managing SSH keys and GNOME keyrings. It is a standard component of GNOME since 2.24.
With Seahorse you can
- Create and manage SSH keys.
- Manage your keyrings.
In the community version, it still supports the management of PGP keys. But since PGP is not available on Solaris, Seahorse on Solaris doesn't support PGP keys yet.
Create and Manage SSH keys
Secure Shell (SSH) is a way of logging into a remote computer
to execute commands on that machine. SSH keys are used in key-based
authentication system, as an alternative to the default password
authentication system.
To create a SSH key, the user needs to give a description of what the
key is to be used for. The user needs to specify the encryption type
(RSA or DSA), the key strength (1024-4096) and the passphrase for the key.
The newly created key is stored at ~/.ssh.
Users can list or delete SSH keys under ~/.ssh. The user can also change
the passphrase for them.
Seahorse uses 'ssh-keygen' to produce these keys.
- change the passphrase
ssh-keygen -p -f input_keyfile
- generate the key
ssh-keygen -b bits -t type -C comment -f output_keyfile
Users can also export SSH private or public keys to files. In fact, Seahorse
just copies the content of files under ~/.ssh to new files. This is for
convenience to some junior users. They don't need to know where SSH keys
are usually stored since Seahorse shows them keys. They can export those
keys into files via Seahorse directly.
Export and Import Keys
Seahorse can import SSH keys from the clipboard or a key file.
Seahorse allows users to specify a SSH key file. Seahorse does not change
the content of imported files, instead, Seahorse copies the imported files
to ~/.ssh with non-duplicated file names.
Seahorse can export public key or private key info to new files.
Seahorse can copy public key info to the clipboard.
Manage keyrings
Users can create and delete keyrings. Users can also change the password
of a keyring. Seahorse does this via interfaces provided by GNOME
keyring.
The created keyring files are stored in ~/.gnome2/keyrings/
Trusted keys.
Users can set ssh public keys as trusted keys. The trusted keys will be put
into the file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.
