X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Message-ID: Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 03:45:48 +0000 From: "Robert McKay" To: cygwin@cygwin.com Subject: Re: ssh asks for key passphrase every time In-Reply-To: <83c75fec0612201145h436a6b04i2740cce0e5b669db@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <83c75fec0612201145h436a6b04i2740cce0e5b669db@mail.gmail.com> X-Google-Sender-Auth: 02d861ce4504ed44 X-IsSubscribed: yes Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help@cygwin.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner@cygwin.com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin@cygwin.com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin@cygwin.com On 12/20/06, burning shadow wrote: > I have created identification key with passphrase (id_dsa). Now every > time I try to open ssh connection to any host, ssh asks for passphrase > for this key. I believed, ssh should ask for a passphrase only if host > wants to accept key. FreeBSD's ssh, for example, does it this way. This is because when the private key is encrypted (with the passphrase) ssh can't read it to tell whether the ssh server asked for it or not :-) To get around this issue ssh looks for the public key and uses that to determine whether or not it should bother decrypting the private key. It does this by checking all the .pub files in your .ssh directory and if it finds a match then it decrypts the corresponding private key. This only works if you've got the public key and it's named with the same prefix as the private key otherwise it will always ask for the passphrase to decrypt the private key. I'm guessing that this may be your issue. Cheers, Robert -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/