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> I feel like ssh-agent is essential to my life but it's badly designed and I have this nagging feeling it's insecure (and articles like this feed this fear).

If the attacker has root-access, like in this article, they could also recover your decrypted private keys from the memory used in active connections. (SSH and SSL both)

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I would hope that ssh zeros the memory used for the private key as soon as it's done with it (which would be after the authentication step in the handshake).

But then it would have to either keep the passphrase in memory (just as bad) or ask for the passphrase each time you reconnect later (defeats the purpose of ssh-agent).

Edit: Nevermind, you're talking about ssh, not ssh-agent..

You're right, I forgot that it would switch to asymmetric crypto after the handshake. My bad.

Still, with root it would be trivial to attach a debugger to the daemon, et cetera.

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