It's Now Possible To Sign Arbitrary Data With Your SSH Keys

 https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/ssh_signatures

Did you know that you can use the ssh-keygen command to sign and verify signatures on arbitrary data, like files and software releases? Although this feature isn't super new - it was added in 2019 with OpenSSH 8.0 - it seems to be little-known. That's a shame because it's super useful and the most viable alternative to PGP for signing data. If you're currently using PGP to sign data, you should consider switching to SSH signatures.

Here's why I like SSH signatures:

• It's not PGP. For years, security professionals have been sounding the alarm on PGP, including its most popular implementation, GnuPG/GPG. PGP is absurdly complex, has an awful user experience, and is full of crufty old cryptography which shouldn't be touched with a ten foot pole.

• SSH is everywhere, and people already have SSH keys. If you use Debian Bullseye or Ubuntu 20.04 or newer, you already have a new enough version of SSH installed. And if you use GitHub, or any other service that uses SSH keys for authentication, you already have an SSH key that can be used to generate signatures. This is why I'm more excited about SSH signatures than other PGP signature alternatives like signify or minisign. Signify and minisign are great, but require you to install new software and generate new keys, which will hinder widespread adoption.

• SSH key distribution is easy. SSH public keys are one line strings that are easy to copy around. You don't need to use the Web of Trust or worry about configuring "trust levels" for keys. GitHub already acts as a key distribution service which is far easier to use and more secure than any of the PGP key servers ever were. You can retrieve the SSH public keys for any GitHub user by visiting a URL like https://github.com/USERNAME.keys. (For example, my public keys are at https://github.com/AGWA.keys.)

  (GitHub acts as a trusted third party here, and you have to trust them not to lie about people's public keys, so it may not be appropriate for all use cases. But relying on a trusted third party with a professional security team like GitHub seems like a way better default than PGP's Web of Trust, which was nigh impossible to use. Key Transparency would address the concerns with trusted third parties, if anyone ever figures out how to audit transparency logs in practice.)

• SSH has optional lightweight certificates. You don't have to use SSH certificates (and most people shouldn't) but if certificates would make your life easier, SSH has a lightweight certificate system that is considerably simpler than X.509. This makes SSH signatures a good alternative to S/MIME as well!