Secure Your Keys with Keychain: Setting Up Key Password Storage on WSL 2 Ubuntu 20.04

If you're using WSL 2 on Ubuntu 20.04 and have keys that you use for various purposes, it's important to keep them secure. One way to do this is by using a keychain to store your key passwords. This will also help to lock down WSL 2 since it requires a password to start the session. In this blog post, we will show you how to set up keychain on WSL 2 Ubuntu 20.04 to store your key passwords.

Step 1: Install Keychain

To install Keychain, open up the terminal in your Ubuntu WSL 2 instance and run the following command:

sudo apt-get install keychain

This will install Keychain on your system.

Step 2: Configure Keychain

Once you have installed Keychain, you need to configure it. To do this, open up your ~/.bashrc file using the following command:

vi ~/.bashrc

Add the following lines to the bottom of the file:

/usr/bin/keychain --clear ~/.ssh/id_rsa
source ~/.keychain/$HOSTNAME-sh

Save and exit the file.

The "--clear" option in the first line makes sure that intruders cannot use your existing SSH-Agent's keys. This is important for security purposes.

The second line automatically load your keys when you start a new terminal session

Step 3: Test Keychain

To test Keychain, open up a new terminal session and run the following command:

ssh-add -l

This command will list the keys that are currently loaded in Keychain..

Conclusion

In this blog post, we showed you how to set up Keychain on WSL 2 Ubuntu 20.04 to store your key passwords. Using Keychain can help to keep your keys secure and lock down WSL 2 since it requires a password to start the session. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below.