Removal of an SSH Key pair from computer
Can anyone tell me the command to remove an SSH KEY pair from my computer where the pair was generated?
Everything I am googling is saying to edit the known host's file, this makes sense except, I do not have any keys in that file.
I am learning how to generate key pairs, and how can you delete an SSH key pair from your computer.
If it helps Im on a Mac and a desktop with Ubuntu 22.04.
Any insight please, and thank you!
2 Replies
watrick
Linode Staff
As far as I can tell, the keys on your local machine are files that you can delete like any other file. Though you'll also want to make sure you remove the keys from your agent.
I found the post online: terminal - How can I delete all SSH keys from my Mac - Stack Overflow
As it suggests, you can run a rm -rf /path/to/keys, though this will remove all keys in that directory. You can also do it on the specific private and public keys to remove from your computer. That would mean you'd want to remove both id_rsa and id_rsa.pub.
But, as that post also points out, you'll want to remove your keys from your agent besides just removing them from your computer. You can this for all keys by running ssh-add -D, or you can run ssh-add -d $key. I got that from the man page for ssh-add:
Instead of adding identities, removes identities from the agent. If ssh-add has been run without arguments, the keys for the default identities and their corresponding certificates will be removed. Otherwise, the argument list will be interpreted as a list of paths to public key files to specify keys and certificates to be removed from the agent. If no public key is found at a given path, ssh-add will append .pub and retry. If the argument list consists of “-” then ssh-add will read public keys to be removed fromstandard input.
The keys on the Mac are in ~/.ssh
You may have lots of keys in there so I suggest you just rename them first, create new ones, and then delete when you are sure you don't need them. (I never delete them). These are on my Mac:
ls -la ~/.ssh
-rw-------@ 1 al staff 218 Feb 27 19:57 config
-rw-------@ 1 al staff 1766 Jul 8 2014 github_rsa
-rw-r--r--@ 1 al staff 402 Jul 8 2014 github_rsa.pub
-rw-------@ 1 al staff 444 Nov 16 2021 id_ed25519
-rw-r--r--@ 1 al staff 120 Nov 16 2021 id_ed25519.pub
-rw-------@ 1 al staff 2635 Nov 15 2021 id_rsa
-rw-r--r--@ 1 al staff 592 Nov 15 2021 id_rsa.pub
-rw-------@ 1 al staff 47475 Mar 13 12:33 known_hosts
-rw-------@ 1 al staff 46343 Feb 6 10:52 known_hosts.old
drwxr-xr-x 6 al staff 192 Nov 15 2021 xxxxconfig-not-used
-rw-------@ 1 al staff 1438 Jul 19 2014 xxxxid_rsa.ppk
-rwx------ 1 al staff 1679 Jul 19 2014 xxxxxid_rsa-alan.txt