How to Store SSH Keys on Password Managers

Introduction #

Managing SSH keys are hard. Especially if you would like to move them to different devices, or sharing the same keys across devices add more complexity. In order to solve this problem, I created SSH Manager to allow other developers to manage their keys on their favourite password managers securely.

SSH Managers supports only 1Password and Bitwarden at the moment, but more managers are on the way.

Prerequisites #

Before you get started, you will need to have a number of things.

1. Go
2. Have the Bitwarden CLI tool installed and available in the $PATH as bw.
3. Or have the 1Password CLI tool installed and available in the $PATH as op.
4. Have the ssh-agent running in the current session.

Installing SSH Manager Binary #

In order to be able to run ssh-manager, we need to install the binary to the local machine. For this, run the following go command to get the package.

go get -u github.com/omegion/ssh-manager

Let’s test that the binary is working:

ssh-manager --help

If everything went well, you will see the CLI help as below:

❯ ssh-manager --help
CLI command to automatically unseal Vault

Usage:
  vault-unseal [command]

Available Commands:
  add         Add Manager key to given provider.
  get         Get Manager key from given provider.
  help        Help about any command
  list        List Manager keys from given provider.
  version     Print the version/build number

Flags:
  -h, --help               help for vault-unseal
      --logFormat string   Set the logging format. One of: text|json (default "text") (default "text")
      --logLevel string    Set the logging level. One of: debug|info|warn|error (default "info")

Use "vault-unseal [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Generate Test SSH Keypair #

Before using your SSH keys to store in Bitwarden, let’s create a dummy keypair and test with it.

1. Open Terminal.
2. Paste the command below

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 

1. When you’re prompted to “Enter a file in which to save the key,” enter test.
2. At the prompt, do not type a secure passphrase.

Add SSH Keys #

Let’s be sure that we have previously created keys:

❯ ls -l test*
-rw-------  1 X  staff  432 Mar 30 08:38 test
-rw-r--r--  1 X  staff  112 Mar 30 08:38 test.pub

I will use Bitwarden as a password manager for this example. Now we can add them to Bitwarden.

ssh-manager add --name test --private-key test --public-key test.pub --provider bw

Get SSH Keys #

Once we have SSH keypair on Bitwarden, let’s get them to our local machine.

❯ ssh-manager get --name test --provider bw
SSH Key test added.

Let’s check ~/.ssh/keys folder if our keys are added.

❯ ls -l ~/.ssh/keys/
-rw-------  1 X  staff   432 Mar 30 11:05 test
-rw-------  1 X  staff   112 Mar 30 11:05 test.pub

Conclusion #

In this tutorial, we generated SSH keypair and store them in a password manager, in this case, we used Bitwarden. Then we used SSH Manager to get the SSH keys to the local machine and add them to ssh-agent.