A couple days ago I discovered the joys of SSH agent forwarding. But with that, I discovered this warning in the man page: "Agent forwarding should be enabled with caution. Users with the ability to bypass file permissions on the remote host (for the agent's UNIX-domain socket) can access the local agent through the forwarded connection. An attacker cannot obtain key material from the agent, however they can perform operations on the keys that enable them to authenticate using the identities loaded into the agent." I've read this about five times because as far as I can tell, all it's actually saying is "you need to trust your remote system." So please correct me if I'm wrong: it's saying that IF someone on the remote system has a privilege escalation (or is root), then they can authenticate using any keys in your agent (but not get the keys). Is that correct? And today I found this: https://heipei.github.io/2015/02/26/SSH-Agent-Forwarding-considered-harmful/ He attacks with "It is meant as an easy way to connect to a host A with your SSH key and from there connect to another host B with that same key. This obviously is only needed if you cannot connect to host B directly from your workstation." I was immediately scratching my head, because my use-case is to load my keys on my workstation, then SSH to a remote host where I do git and/or ansible stuff that needs a key. I can connect to "host B" (the git host) from "my workstation," but the work is better done on "host A." With agent forwarding, I don't have to store the private key on the remote machine, or (re)load an SSH key. So I see that agent forwarding might be unwise if you don't trust the administrator or the machine is compromised (and yes, you can never be sure a machine is secure), but if you're worried about the security of the remote host, storing private keys on it and reauthenticating seems worse. Am I missing something? -- Giles http://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com