[patch] ssh-keygen(1): generate Ed25519 keys when invoked without arguments

[Jochen Bern]

On 04.09.23 16:43, Joseph S. Testa II wrote:
> What I'm hearing in this thread is: "a minority of people on planet
> Earth have a problem with the open-source implementation of ED25519,
> but instead of letting that minority choose to re-implement it when/if
> they want to, the rest of the community needs to stall their progress
> in improving security."
[...]
> I very often see IT personnel and developers simply use the default
> options for ssh-keygen.  They just don't care/don't know to care.
>   Switching the default to ED25519 would bring the equivalent security
> up from 112-bits to 128-bits (as 2048-bit RSA is equivalent to 112-bits
> of symmetric strength), which would be a nice improvement for the
> community at large.

If what you want is an "improvement for the community at large", you 
should advocate to have a nonspecific ssh-keygen invocation generate a 
keypair for the *two* most useful crypto schemes. I still fondly (not!!) 
remember the morning we found that a certain distrib had panicked and 
shipped nightly updates to disable the "broken!!" (not quite yet) ECDSA 
scheme; I was the only sysadmin here who not only had available, but 
also *distributed* his RSA pubkey along with the "more modern" ECDSA one.

(Since I often stumble over systems where it's "RSA or stay out!", I 
currently urge people around here to use both 4+k RSA and ED25519. Few 
listen, alas. :-/ )

Kind regards,
-- 
Jochen Bern
Systemingenieur

Binect GmbH
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