I was looking in to this just earlier today. The native macos version worries me a little because it seems someone just happened to discover it in MacOS, rather than it being a documented feature. The worry being Apple could change or remove it later locking you out of your keys since they never advertised this as a thing you could do.
Just to clarify this - you can have multiple public keys for the same user on the server end, in ~user/.ssh/authorized_keys. It's obvious when you know it, but I think it can be a source of confusion when discussing backup keys.
I've been using Secretive (a nice software wrapper for these) for a few days for my Github keys (where 1Password holds the rest of my SSH keys). It works nicely, but obviously you can't back up a key that started life in a secure enclave, so you'll need alternative access arrangements for anything you setup that way.
2nd this. Found out about it when this type of thing came up about a week ago. I had a hard time getting the stock stuff going but Secretive made it easy to set up and I love using it.
I used yubikeys for ssh for years. First via the older clunky gpg as ssh key feature. Then via the FIDO api. My biggest issue was the chicken and egg issue when using this setup on a new machine or god forbid in a container etc. windows and WLS wasn’t super thrilled either.
I switched to 1Password ssh because I actually like the fact that I can simply share my keys. It’s still not perfect. Agent forwarding needs an extra configuration and depending how many keys you have and how verbose your ssh config gets it becomes also very finicky.
This solution feels for me like a slight setback because it’s a macOS only solution. If you have a Linux or windows machine next to a Mac you have to deal with the insecure key file on your hard drive again either via yubi keys or software solutions.
But I think I would take this over a yubikey. I really disliked the fact that one usb port was constantly in use.
Sure and pop in whenever I do a git commit? I also sign my commits. I used GPG (different key on the same hardware key) and now via SSH key. I had both a compact and bigger key. I got the compact key because my very first yubikey nearly broke. I lifted my Mac while it was connected and it cracked in the middle. I bought a compact one next which can stay inside and that one you don’t want to take out. It’s so small you’ll lose it. I know because that happened to my backup key … (that was actually the idea for the bigger one I bought but I lost the damn thing during the setup phase)
But having the yubikey bound to your Mac at all times is also stupid because it doesn’t come with a fingerprint or other biometric sensor. The idea is that you use this thing as a token not that you leave the key in the lock at all times. For that alone I would favor the enclave solution.
Touch is not the same as biometrics. I think they’re saying that leaving it plugged in means that anyone that can unlock your computer can also use/touch your yubikey.
The way I think of it is YubiKeys should be used to basically provision a computer with an approved device specific key. Whether it's a passkey or SE/TPM secured SSH/GPG/TLS key: the Yubikey holds the credential everyone trusts and therefore can be used from any device to gain access and enroll a new approved key.
I’m a bit lost and maybe something also got lost in translation. I use 1Password to store multiple ssh keys for different services. I have a very restrictive ssh config because I don’t like to use ssh agent which hands out all keys to different connections. I use one key for a set of machines for work. One for GitHub etc etc etc. I connect to these machines from different endpoints. And I don’t want to register each of these with a new custom keypair to all the services. Like GitHub. I have 1Password installed on all desktops I use so I pull them from there. I share the same dot files and configuration. For GitHub I actually need 3 keys. My private key, 2 for work that have special SSO permissions. I don’t want my private key to have access to the work repos that’s why I split and my company has 2 different enterprise accounts where I have 2 different user accounts.
These days I'm mainly doing development inside VM's. Previously I was embedding Github key to each VM, but since I setup Secure Enclave (with Secretive), I'm only forwarding it's agent to VM and each git action on origin now requires approval using fingerprint reader. I think this a good way to prevent malware from gaining access to github
Those access token can still be stolen just the same. The Secure Enclave is better because you can ask it to authorise the action, but you can never get the key out of it, so the latest malicious npm package can’t send off your access tokens or ssh keys.
PAT are vulnerable, once stolen they can be used from anywhere until their (usually) long term expiry.
Better use short lived tokens with auto refresh. For example OAuth tokens. They can be used for the same use cases like PAT, but they expire after a max of 2 hours.
2 hours is plenty. The recent binance hack was 20 minutes after all. A 2 hour token is enough time to get all that can be gotten or done by a token in almost any system especially well defined ones like GH or GL.
It would be nice if GitHub or GitLab could limit a token to a given IP, but with how proxies and dynamic ips work I would imagine it would be a hassle to get it working correctly for everyone, but it’s better than nothing.
Security features like this works, until it doesn't.
When I installed WireGuard on macOS, I was happy to discover that it stores private keys in the system keychain. Accessing the private key requires Touch ID.
Then one day after a system upgrade, the WireGuard app crashed on startup with:
[APP] Unable to open config from keychain: -25300
Then the app deleted all profiles because they are all "orphaned", apparently for "keychain consistency" [0].
From then on, I just use a text editor to edit my WireGuard configuration files, and import them to the app. The bug still exists to this day [1].
So many of the keychain APIs are "deprecated" (read: marked as "we will nuke this API whenever we want") and have been for a decade or more, but have no replacement either.
A lot of the Security Framework came from Classic, hell, the idea of a keychain came from Classic! Just a mess.
Can echo this, I've also fallen foul of keychain behaviour. In my case I found a lookup that passed the account name as raw bytes instead of text didn't match my item. On macOS it matched all items with a blank account (strictly, generic password items), which on my computer meant items from GitHub CLI, Malwarebytes, and Adobe Creative Cloud. The app I was building silently used one of those as its key, and would change whenever one of those apps would update its entry. The fix was to make sure the account is passed as a string and that it has a service name so that lookup either matches exactly my item or none. The API takes a loosely typed dictionary, so wrong types throw no errors, just different behaviour. I now always test against the real keychain and not a mock.
Edit (March 2025):
Wireguard, to my surprise, has no bug tracking system like Jira or issue tracking area such as GitHub.
If you want to see this fixed, the only way to instigate change is to write team@wireguard.com and jason@zx2c4.com.
> You linked a commit and a Reddit post. Is there a proper Github issue as well?
It's funny you mentioned that. The GitHub repository is a mirror of https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-apple. You cannot create issues there. You're supposed to send a bug report to the mailing list, which is enough friction that none of us did so far.
> I've passed on reporting so many bugs, because I refuse to create a Microsoft account to do it.
99% of the time it's perfectly fine to just email the maintainer with a bug report and maybe a patch.
> In fact, I don't understand how sending an email is high friction.
Judging from the fact that after so many years, such a widespread (as seen in the Reddit post and here) issue still hasn't resulted in a single bug report in the mailing list, I'd say most people (including myself) do indeed consider using a mailing list to be higher friction.
If I'm not mistaken, unless you're already CC'ed by a participant, you'd have to subscribe to the whole mailing list just to receive notifications for a single thread. For an "issue" on a Git forge, participation is usually as easy as upvoting and then clicking the "Subscribe" button.
Assuming you're already using MS Github. Anyway, even if I was, a lot of Github project require filling out an absurd Simon Says form. Or that scene from Indiana Jones where he takes a wrong step and falls through the floor. That's nothing to do with email or Microsoft specifically, it's just another reason I almost never bother reporting bugs. Talk about friction.
Yeah, I hate these forms (issue templates) too. Every time I have to fill such a form, I always feel that they are discouraging me from writing the bug description in a natural, coherent way. I'd spend more effort to make sure the description is clear and contains all necessary information, if there's no issue template requirements.
Yes, but most people won't. Most people will submit a bug report with important information missing that means we have to go back and forth. Also, there is often specific debugging information that people would not even know would be useful.
In the current age, its useful because AI will submit tickets using the CLI that don't use the form, so I can immediately close and lock them and go on living my life.
This is not a feature built for security nerds. This is a feature built for corporate compliance box tickers, and it works precisely as wanted in corporate environments, where all lost secrets can be easily replaced after visiting the helpdesk room personally.
The worst part: the people that work at your bank and at city hall are not security nerds, and don't care to become security nerds. do with that what you will.
I'm using WireGuard myself. Not on MacOS, but on Windows/Linux/Android.
The reason I went with WireGuard to begin with, is due to how secure it suppsedly was. Having long standing unresolved issues like that is a bit worrying. I'm still most likely safe, but it's not exactly reassuring, either
This is likely just that if someone chooses an OS that requires a special HW just to build a release with no easy cross-compilation possible, and to pay a gatekeeper just to publish it, and that can't even run on an emulated computer properly, they can't expect FOSS maintainers will be bothered with much more than "here's a source code, build it/test it/do QA yourself if you like" for their particular pet platform.
For platforms where development is unhindered by arbitrary obstacles like these and others, wireguard works fine. :)
Just going to reply to your comment here: the choice to use wireguard shouldn't come down to relative security (although I guess it gets a benefit here), but from being fast and simplistic.
All of the traditional components of VPN management are removed from the core code. Wireguard follows the model "do one thing, and do it well." It's also built into the kernel, which inherently can make it faster than userland VPN software.
This is why companies like Tailscale exist--as they're basically selling back the features that you would get in a more traditional IPSEC VPN, but in front of Wireguard instead.
It's often the case that we make much effort into securing the key but expose it via an open agent socket at a well known path or use an open control master path for multiplexing.
Certain automation and dev tools like Ansible make it a pain to work if agent key requires a confirmation.
Weirdly enough, this is _why_ I ended up using Secretive: I needed a second ssh-agent because selecting which keys are forwarded per-host is very fiddly, and while standard ssh-agent kinda supports it, 1Password doesn't. Anyway, _a_ solution for this is having separate SSH agents, and Secretive is another agent on top of 1Password.
The author says he doesn’t like the idea of having keys sitting on his file system ready to be snatched by bad actors.
That’s why they should be passphrase protected.
You use ssh agent to store the keys in memory and for convenience you can store the passphrases in keychain. MacOS OpenSSH has the UseKeychain config directive for that.
I use Yubikey/FIDO2 myself, but not because private keys cannot be protected on a file system.
Secure Enclave is still more secure in that it should be impossible to access the private key. Password protected keys are still vulnerable to malware that can read the keyboard, trick you in to typing the password, or that have exploits in macOS to read the memory.
If you have malware that can read the keyboard, can't it just inject code via the keyboard to add their own authorized key to whatever server you're connecting to?
Do you type your passphrase every time you log into a remote machine? If not, the private key is in RAM and can be extracted by malware and stolen. If so, that's way more annoying than using touchid or some other physical proof of presence.
I used to install ssh_locker [1] (I don’t know if it still works), and have the passphrase in a keychain separate from the default `login` that I then set in Keychain Access to autolock after a set period of time. Handy for keeping the private key for a while in RAM and then autoremoved, instead of having it there for the whole session. It worked transparently and is a feature that should come with the OS.
ChatGPT says ssh_locker locked the keys with `ssh-add -x` which doesn’t necessarily remove them from RAM. Duh! It does point to suggested minimal changes to its source code to effectively accomplish that though.
Being able to extract a private key from ssh-agent's PR_SET_DUMPABLE=0 process would be a kernel bug; if you're sitting on such a vulnerability, please consider reporting it.
So the malware modifies your environment to LD_PRELOAD something into ssh-agent instead on your next login? Stuff that runs inside your own session is inherently vulnerable to malware inside that, even if ptrace protections are a speedbump.
Key on disk plus a passphrase is still only 1FA. Key in the SE + an unseal PIN is 2FA. There's already plenty written about why one is better better than the other.
Not sure how many people feel like this, the risk in plain sight is a lot easier to handle than the risk hiding under the layers. You can keep shifting the storage for the key, one way or another you have to open up a channel to access to key or use the key. That channel would then become the vulnerability target.
To prove possession of a private key, one needs only to sign something with that key (this is how SSH key auth works). This is how things like the macOS Secure Enclave operate - the private key is stored in a separate hardware chip that only exposes an interface to sign something with that key, never to actually present the key. To obtain the key would require having physical access to the computer, ripping it open, and performing advanced deconstruction and analysis of that chip.
I dont want to be rude, I am aware of the operational semantics. Getting what you want to be signed with the key is the external channel operation I was referring to. In this particular case, somehow the attack vector being disabled is the actual private key being locked from any export. This gives a sense of security, however the channel abuse can bypass the security.
You’re right, but this is why the author doesn’t want to use the secure enclave without touchID, so that the channel being abused requires him being prompted and approving every abuse of the channel. This really is significantly more secure than the key just being on disk (obviously at the cost of convenience)
Its a rabbit hole, which is what I referred as layers of security/obscurity giving a sense of security. Theoretically the person touches the touchID for the key usage, however in reality the usage fatigue kicks in, performance considerations kick in and you end up with a small window where risk is considered worth the trade off. The key is in the cache available for the process/program that you already consented to in the last few occurrences without explicit prompt. The attack vector is that I am behaving nice for the first time to gain your trust, and then I do what I planned for. Worst, in supply chain attacks your program was compromised by a third party.
My original thought was that people often confuse complexity as security. Its added friction layer for sure, however it cuts both ways, makes slightly harder for every day hacker, the monitoring becomes harder as well.
I use 1Password's `op` for this, but with an allowance: my dev environment keys.
I found I was getting fingerprint fatigue. Do I need a fingerprint request every time my dev server wants to connect to dev Supabase? No. That's expected, and zero risk. There's no data there.
I worried that a nefarious request would be auto-approved by me. When you see 20 requests a day, your muscle memory just reaches for the sensor.
So I have a separate 1Password vault that a service account [0] can read. That token is in my environment as OP_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_TOKEN, which the `op` tool understands.
It also has access to a vault with 'AI-safe' keys that I want Claude to be able to access without asking me.
Now, these requests work invisibly. And when I see a fingerprint popup, it's unusual, and I don't auto-approve by habit.
I also keep an item called '_One-day keys' in a separate vault. (The underscore just pushing it to the top of the list for easy access.)
It has prod keys, mostly restricted read-only. If required, I move that over to the open vault. Claude knows this item and has instructions to remind me to move it back out when it's finished what it was doing.
Proton Pass with `pass-cli` has a similar thing, for anyone using that. You can give agents an expirable token and get an audit log of what item was read and when.
MCP for this would feel like I was giving up control? I don't know exactly what that thing is doing. Whereas I know exactly how my configuration works.
You're right, thanks. The trailing ssh: is the comment: changing or removing it leaves the fingerprint the same. The FIDO application ID is also encoded inside the key blob, and it's also "ssh:", which is what confused me. I'll fix the post.
In case you want to just have an encrypted SSH key with password in keychain, you can make it work automatically when logged in (and when Mac is unlocked) by putting in .ssh/config:
One fundamental problem with agentic development is that accessing the secure enclave key requires human presence. If you're running headless and aren't logged in, Secretive (not sure about others) will not be able to access the enclave, even when you only chose "notify" and not "touchid".
This is why I'm skeptical that the approach can scale reliably, even though I'm relying on it today. (Yes, PATs would fix this, but the enclave model is what I'm trying to retain for now.) What I've done instead is wrote a small daemon that sets the SSH authentication socket and does agent forwarding. This works when I'm traveling with laptop...but not yet from my mobile phone.
NB: I'm not using Rex instead of herdr and because Rex uses its own protocol, I always need to have one SSH tunnel to reset the remote agent socket. Not optimal, but it works. All of this feels wrong from a UX perspective, and it feels like I'm holding on too hard on secure enclave for what my use cases are. Feedback appreciated!
I got a similar idea recently. I was becoming annoyed with the coding agent, running on my laptop, being unable to use sudo (with my supervision) when ssh-ing to my remote server. I wanted to build this as a PAM module.
I started building this but after a while I googled (well… asked an agent) a bit more and found out that it already exists: https://github.com/z4yx/pam_rssh
1. The Secure Enclave being inaccessible when you're not present is a feature, not a bug. If you need to run headless then its not the correct solution to your problem and you'll have to find another.
2. You don't need an SSH agent proxy, you can use a `match` block in your `ssh_config` with something like `host * exec "test -z $SSH_TTY` to check whether you're operating over an SSH connection and select Secretive's SSH agent if you're using the machine locally.
Not sure how it works on macos, but on Windows the downside of agents using TPM backed Windows Hello keys (sk) is that the session can't be reused for scp/sftp and agents like to do one-action scripts, so you're doing the user presence pin/finger multiple times for each ssh command it executes.
I've started building a timeout-based ssh-agent population utility, but if I'm honest, TPM keys without user presence is probably sufficient.
Set the following in your SSH config, which will cause SSH to establish a single control channel when it first opens a connection to a host and maintain it until there's been 10 minutes of inactivity. That way the first connection requires auth for your SSH agent but it can then be reused for things like SFTP channels or opening another terminal.
Host \*
controlMaster auto
controlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%n:%p
controlPersist 10m
I'm not using the secure enclave, but I've been using YubiKeys for many years, and now that AI has arrived, I consider the above to be a good thing.
This means, for example, that unless I am physically present with my key inserted, activated, and touched on every operation, an AI agent cannot access any of my production servers. As I do not want AI agents to access my production servers, this is a very good protection technique. I am assuming that no matter how well you try to sandbox and restrict your AI agents running on your local machine, they might eventually be able to access any file in the file system.
On macOS use “Secretive”. It’s a small app that can generate keys from Secure Enclave and prompts you with touchid whenever those keys are being used
On iOS/ipad/(also macOS) you can also use the SSH terminal emulator Termius which has support for SE keys built in as well. So I have the set of keys synced to my VPS, this way I know that only my physical devices can log in and nothing else.
Secure Enclave, TPM and other such security features are unfortunately so badly documented and need so many hoops to jump through to get them working, with any mistake either causing you to be locked out completely or to not give you the protection you wanted. There really should be a better way to make these technologies usable...
One of the problems I constantly face is that the SSH configuration is not portable when I use these esoteric things. Even with Secretive (which plugs a simple SSH socket), remote agent forwarding sometimes fail. (ie. Due to the old version on the server)
Moreover, it is not possible to drop these files into a file-sharing folder, like OneDrive or iCloudDrive, and share them with many hosts at the same time.
I found the hacker way simplest and easiest; put a makefile with bunch of rules, have a "central" host/machine to distribute the keys and configuration from that point...
145 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 65.1 ms ] threadWork on macOS 26 and later.
Unless you specifically mean (f)TPMs/secure envlaves.
Definitely a recco from me as well. -- git hub here: https://github.com/maxgoedjen/secretive
But I think I would take this over a yubikey. I really disliked the fact that one usb port was constantly in use.
The idea is precisely that you keep them permanently connected in the laptop.
SSH private keys should be passphrase protected.
You don’t have to do that if you use FIDO2 with a Yubikey.
It’s a mind shift worth considering.
You then can accept that your ssh keys are different per hardware token (because the private key cannot be extracted).
No more sharing of private keys in your password manager.
I’ve grown to appreciate ssh should only be used with git for signing commits and as a deploy key (eg in a CI system).
I always use https for day to day git operations. My keys reside in gopass and are extracted by gopass-git-credential when needed by git.
I use that within devcontainers
https://github.com/gopasspw/git-credential-gopass
Better use short lived tokens with auto refresh. For example OAuth tokens. They can be used for the same use cases like PAT, but they expire after a max of 2 hours.
It would be nice if GitHub or GitLab could limit a token to a given IP, but with how proxies and dynamic ips work I would imagine it would be a hassle to get it working correctly for everyone, but it’s better than nothing.
When I installed WireGuard on macOS, I was happy to discover that it stores private keys in the system keychain. Accessing the private key requires Touch ID.
Then one day after a system upgrade, the WireGuard app crashed on startup with:
Then the app deleted all profiles because they are all "orphaned", apparently for "keychain consistency" [0].From then on, I just use a text editor to edit my WireGuard configuration files, and import them to the app. The bug still exists to this day [1].
[0] https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-apple/commit/dfb685f2...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/WireGuard/comments/wyt828/osx_wireg...
A lot of the Security Framework came from Classic, hell, the idea of a keychain came from Classic! Just a mess.
You linked a commit and a Reddit post. Is there a proper Github issue as well?
It's funny you mentioned that. The GitHub repository is a mirror of https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-apple. You cannot create issues there. You're supposed to send a bug report to the mailing list, which is enough friction that none of us did so far.
Emailed per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50450200
Definitely still a bug right? Linked them to your parent comment.
Edit: oops sorry team, think you're on it (4d ago): https://github.com/whyredfire/wireguard-apple/commit/0bac142...
Guess it can serve as feedback on the friction when issues can't simply be opened though!
I appreciate when both options exist, because I've passed on reporting so many bugs, because I refuse to create a Microsoft account to do it.
In fact, I don't understand how sending an email is high friction.
99% of the time it's perfectly fine to just email the maintainer with a bug report and maybe a patch.
> In fact, I don't understand how sending an email is high friction.
Judging from the fact that after so many years, such a widespread (as seen in the Reddit post and here) issue still hasn't resulted in a single bug report in the mailing list, I'd say most people (including myself) do indeed consider using a mailing list to be higher friction.
If I'm not mistaken, unless you're already CC'ed by a participant, you'd have to subscribe to the whole mailing list just to receive notifications for a single thread. For an "issue" on a Git forge, participation is usually as easy as upvoting and then clicking the "Subscribe" button.
In the current age, its useful because AI will submit tickets using the CLI that don't use the form, so I can immediately close and lock them and go on living my life.
And features built for normal people
The overlap is very rare
For platforms where development is unhindered by arbitrary obstacles like these and others, wireguard works fine. :)
All of the traditional components of VPN management are removed from the core code. Wireguard follows the model "do one thing, and do it well." It's also built into the kernel, which inherently can make it faster than userland VPN software.
This is why companies like Tailscale exist--as they're basically selling back the features that you would get in a more traditional IPSEC VPN, but in front of Wireguard instead.
It's often the case that we make much effort into securing the key but expose it via an open agent socket at a well known path or use an open control master path for multiplexing.
Certain automation and dev tools like Ansible make it a pain to work if agent key requires a confirmation.
The author says he doesn’t like the idea of having keys sitting on his file system ready to be snatched by bad actors.
That’s why they should be passphrase protected.
You use ssh agent to store the keys in memory and for convenience you can store the passphrases in keychain. MacOS OpenSSH has the UseKeychain config directive for that.
I use Yubikey/FIDO2 myself, but not because private keys cannot be protected on a file system.
Assuming the attacker has user rights (which it needs to read the key) it could also read the passphrase, right?
[1]: https://github.com/ddribin/ssh_locker
My original thought was that people often confuse complexity as security. Its added friction layer for sure, however it cuts both ways, makes slightly harder for every day hacker, the monitoring becomes harder as well.
I found I was getting fingerprint fatigue. Do I need a fingerprint request every time my dev server wants to connect to dev Supabase? No. That's expected, and zero risk. There's no data there.
I worried that a nefarious request would be auto-approved by me. When you see 20 requests a day, your muscle memory just reaches for the sensor.
So I have a separate 1Password vault that a service account [0] can read. That token is in my environment as OP_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_TOKEN, which the `op` tool understands.
It also has access to a vault with 'AI-safe' keys that I want Claude to be able to access without asking me.
Now, these requests work invisibly. And when I see a fingerprint popup, it's unusual, and I don't auto-approve by habit.
I also keep an item called '_One-day keys' in a separate vault. (The underscore just pushing it to the top of the list for easy access.)
It has prod keys, mostly restricted read-only. If required, I move that over to the open vault. Claude knows this item and has instructions to remind me to move it back out when it's finished what it was doing.
[0]: https://www.1password.dev/service-accounts/get-started
MCP for this would feel like I was giving up control? I don't know exactly what that thing is doing. Whereas I know exactly how my configuration works.
I think this is incorrect and the "ssh:" at the end is indeed a comment.
This is why I'm skeptical that the approach can scale reliably, even though I'm relying on it today. (Yes, PATs would fix this, but the enclave model is what I'm trying to retain for now.) What I've done instead is wrote a small daemon that sets the SSH authentication socket and does agent forwarding. This works when I'm traveling with laptop...but not yet from my mobile phone.
Example:
NB: I'm not using Rex instead of herdr and because Rex uses its own protocol, I always need to have one SSH tunnel to reset the remote agent socket. Not optimal, but it works. All of this feels wrong from a UX perspective, and it feels like I'm holding on too hard on secure enclave for what my use cases are. Feedback appreciated!I’m a happy user!
1. The Secure Enclave being inaccessible when you're not present is a feature, not a bug. If you need to run headless then its not the correct solution to your problem and you'll have to find another.
2. You don't need an SSH agent proxy, you can use a `match` block in your `ssh_config` with something like `host * exec "test -z $SSH_TTY` to check whether you're operating over an SSH connection and select Secretive's SSH agent if you're using the machine locally.
I've started building a timeout-based ssh-agent population utility, but if I'm honest, TPM keys without user presence is probably sufficient.
I'm not using the secure enclave, but I've been using YubiKeys for many years, and now that AI has arrived, I consider the above to be a good thing.
This means, for example, that unless I am physically present with my key inserted, activated, and touched on every operation, an AI agent cannot access any of my production servers. As I do not want AI agents to access my production servers, this is a very good protection technique. I am assuming that no matter how well you try to sandbox and restrict your AI agents running on your local machine, they might eventually be able to access any file in the file system.
On iOS/ipad/(also macOS) you can also use the SSH terminal emulator Termius which has support for SE keys built in as well. So I have the set of keys synced to my VPS, this way I know that only my physical devices can log in and nothing else.
It's effectively an open source version of a YubiKey, the hardware itself is all open source and it handles ed255519 SSH keys really well.
inb4 they're not the same, I know, I really like what the TKey team is doing.
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46025721
One of the problems I constantly face is that the SSH configuration is not portable when I use these esoteric things. Even with Secretive (which plugs a simple SSH socket), remote agent forwarding sometimes fail. (ie. Due to the old version on the server)
Moreover, it is not possible to drop these files into a file-sharing folder, like OneDrive or iCloudDrive, and share them with many hosts at the same time.
I found the hacker way simplest and easiest; put a makefile with bunch of rules, have a "central" host/machine to distribute the keys and configuration from that point...