I don’t like my ssh keys being stored in plain sight, I also don’t like having to type a passphrase to use them.
On windows, once you run ssh-add, the key is stored in a secure way and managed by some kind of session manager (source), at that point you can delete the key file and go about your life knowing that the key is safe and you won’t need to type a password again.
I would like something similar on linux, like storing the key via libsecret as you do with git, so that you can access your servers without having a key in plain text.
I think it’s possible to generate a key with a passphrase and have gnome-keyring or kwallet remember the passphrase, but it would be nicer to just securely store the key itself.
Can that be done?
I’n Windows it is not stored in a keyring but instead in the registry. This has basically the same security threat model as a local key file.
The ssh-agent on Linux will do what you want with effectively the same security. The biggest difference being that it doesn’t run as a system service but instead runs in userspace which can make it easier to dump memory. There are some other agent services out there with additional security options but they don’t change the threat model much.