How to use SSH Keys?

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21

@bradster2214 Welcome to the forum!

That is not the latest version. I think you mean the desktop app here, and the latest version is 2025.4.2 I think.

22

Huh youā€™re right. I donā€™t know why mine doesnā€™t report any updates after i explicitly told it to check for updates. Maybe an uninstall and reinstall is needed.

Iā€™ll update when i get time and update if it fixes it :slight_smile:

23

Although I use macos and iphone, it has been working properly for me on mac for about 1-2 month. (Although it is true that on iphone I donā€™t see any option to modify or create new ones, but I donā€™t need it.) Try updating to the latest version, 2024.12 is a very old version.

24

and it looks like a 256 or 512 bit key, and i need to create a 4096 one.

Bitwarden supports RSA keys and ed25519 keys for import, but only ed25519 keys for generation. This is deliberate. Ed25519 keys are indeed shorter (256 bits), but more secure than RSA 4096 bit keys. [1] [2]

RSA keys (even 4096-Bit) is at this point only recommended for authenticating to legacy systems that do not support ed25519. If you are sure that you want an RSA key, then you can generate it locally, using i.e openssh, and import it. Ed25519 keys are the recommended, new, and most secure key type.

Your desktop app also seems out of date. Iā€™m not sure that 2024.12.1 is fully supported here, please get 2025.3.1 if you want to use RSA keys. (2025.4.2 currently has a defect for RSA keys specifically, ed25519 is not affected).

25

Is there any chance ECDSA (or any other algorithms) will be supported in the future?

26

(or any other algorithms)

Which specifically? Aside from RSA and Ed25519, there is only ECDSA. If you can make provide a compelling reason of why ECDSA should be supported when Ed25519 is already supported, Iā€™m happy to pass it along.

When post-quantum digital signature schemes (ML-DSA) are standardized for SSH (draft-sfluhrer-ssh-mldsa-00 - SSH Support of ML-DSA), thatā€™s a very compelling case to add support for a new signature scheme.

27

Works well with Putty & FileZilla, much thanks :person_bowing:

28

Iā€™ve been testing the SSH agent out, and it has a few usability issues:

  1. I canā€™t add keys to it like a regular ssh-agent using ssh-add (without actually adding them in Bitwarden)
  2. If I have multiple Bitwarden accounts, I have to constantly switch between accounts in the desktop app to be able to use the keys from them. It also doesnā€™t work when I have to log into a machine using a key in one vault, and then use a key from another vault to do something like push to GitLab.
  3. The agent often breaks when switching between accounts.
  4. Bitwarden seems to choke on importing some SSH keys (The SSH key type is not supported) even though they are just RSA keys.

Perhaps it would be better if Bitwarden acted as a proxy to a real ssh-agent? Or perhaps just acts as ssh-add instead of a full agent? That way you can load keys from Bitwarden into your SSH agent, without all the apparent limitations of the actual SSH agent in Bitwarden.

Iā€™m likely going back to bitwarden-ssh-agent as it seems to be far more flexible for what I want and uses a regular ssh-agent so I can add non-Bitwarden SSH keys into it.

29

I managed to solve #4 by doing the following:

ssh-keygen -p -N "" -f /path/to/key

which converted it to OpenSSH format which I could then import.

30

Also, thereā€™s no way to create/import SSH keys in the Web Vault.