ssh asks for passphrase

[Xavier Claessens]

Every time I open gnome-terminal to connect to a remote host using ssh, it's asking me the passphrase of my ssh key. It was working fine on both my laptops (Ubuntu 16.04 and 17.10) and stopped working on both after the upgrade to 18.04.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: openssh-client 1:7.6p1-4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-15.16-generic 4.15.15
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-15-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu5
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Tue Apr 17 09:30:03 2018
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-01-09 (97 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" - Release amd64 (20171018)
RelatedPackageVersions:
 ssh-askpass N/A
 libpam-ssh N/A
 keychain N/A
 ssh-askpass-gnome N/A
SSHClientVersion: OpenSSH_7.6p1 Ubuntu-4, OpenSSL 1.0.2n 7 Dec 2017
SourcePackage: openssh
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to bionic on 2018-04-12 (4 days ago)

[Xavier Claessens (zdra)]

xclaesse@xclaesse-PC:~$ env | grep SSH
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/run/user/1000/keyring/ssh
SSH_AGENT_PID=2183
xclaesse@xclaesse-PC:~$ ps aux | grep ssh
root 1263 0.0 0.0 72296 5720 ? Ss 09:26 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd -D
xclaesse 2183 0.0 0.0 11304 320 ? Ss 09:26 0:00 /usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/im-launch env GNOME_SHELL_SESSION_MODE=ubuntu gnome-session --session=ubuntu
xclaesse 3454 0.0 0.0 11304 1520 ? S 09:27 0:00 /usr/bin/ssh-agent -D -a /run/user/1000/keyring/.ssh
xclaesse 4924 0.0 0.0 15664 1048 pts/0 S+ 09:37 0:00 grep --color=auto ssh
xclaesse@xclaesse-PC:~$ ssh pasanda
Enter passphrase for key '/home/xclaesse/.ssh/id_rsa':

[Xavier Claessens (zdra)]

Ok, I understood what's going on here! I had many ssh private keys and some of them have length <1024 but my main one is 2048. ssh-add doesn't add any key just because one of them is unsafe. I removed old keys and the problem is fixed.

I guess this is an upstream bug and not Ubuntu.

[Joshua Powers (powersj)]

Thanks for following up! I'll mark this as invalid.