seahorse ssh key timeless cache

[Gabriel Dragffy]

On Fri, 2007-05-18 at 15:00 -0300, Felipe Figueiredo wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am using seahorse to manage my gpg/ssh keys, and was thrilled as I just 
> found out what "forward agent" really is: when the ssh-agent is active I only 
> have to type my passphrase once, it gets cached, and I can ssh with it to 
> host A without further hassle any time. Nothing new here.
> 
> But as I just found out, I can also connect from host A to host B without 
> typing the passphrase (it's the same key, but host B is not directly 
> accesible from the net). I don't know why debian/ubuntu disables this by 
> default, but it's very nice when you open and close sessions frequently.
> 
> Now, my concern is that seahorse doesn't seem to have any time out policy for 
> this cache. In my experiments at my home computer, it would keep my 
> passphrase for over a day. I find this disturbing, especially now that I know 
> someone with physical access to my box have access to ALL hosts with my 
> ssh-key, without having to know my passphrase. IIRC, the vanilla agent I 
> installed years ago to use gpg with kmail timed out after a few minutes, and 
> I'm sure pgp4pine times out. Heck, why would anybody like to leave his 
> passphrase in memory for indefinite time?
> 
> Is it a feature or a bug? Is there a way get it to time out, say, after 5 
> minutes?
> 
> regards
> FF
> 

But you can change the cache time from infintie to anything you want.
Just right-click on the icon in where it shows next to the clock and
select cache preferneces, then allow it to expire after however many
minutes.

-- 
Gabriel Dragffy FdA BA(Hons)


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