Authentication explanation

I went in to the Key Creation window on Kleopatra and under the advanced settings there is an option for Authentication which is unchecked by default.

Can anyone explain what this option does? I looked through the help and the handbook for Kleopatra and didn’t see anything about it.

Thanks

Hi,

that is actually a pretty cool feature.

You can use PGP Keys as “Authentication” to log into computer systems. For example over SSH.

So someone who has a certified trust path into my PGP key can directly give me access to a system by using “gpg --export-ssh-key aheinecke@gnupg.org” and then add the result to authenticated_keys. I can then use my PGP key to authenticate with this System and login. Otherwise I would have needed to explicitly send this recipient my SSH Public key and would need to have an additional secret key on my system.

In short you can basically say: “An authentication subkey is a SSH Key bound to the OpenPGP Key”.

Hmm interesting… I had no idea you could do that with a PGP key. I tried looking online for information on Authentication with PGP keys and couldn’t really find anything.

Thanks for the explanation.