Re: Key management using a USB key

[Ben Hill <ben@serosoft.com>]

On Tue, 2005-03-08 at 00:46 +0100, David Härdeman wrote:
> first of all, this might be slightly off-topic for the debian-devel 
> list, but I've got the impression that it's already been solved by some 
> DD's and might prove interesting to others (including non-DD's such as 
> me).

I use a very small USB key for my gnupg and ssh keys. I had created
the .gnupg and .ssh directories in my home a long time ago, so I
formatted the USB device as ext2, and copied the two directories to the
USB device as ssh and gnupg.

In my home directory I create a symlink for /media/usbkey/ssh -> ~/.ssh
and /media/usbkey/gnupg -> ~/.gnupg.

So, when I stick the dongle into the USB slot, the drive is
automatically mounted, and the symlinks point to my real key
directories.

When the key is out of the machine, my keys are safe offline.

HTH

Ben