Report this

What is the reason for this report?

Is it okay to share Private SSH key with developer?

Posted on March 23, 2022
tev

By tev

I was asked to share my Private SSh Key - but I have read that you NEVER SHARE THIS FILE. What should I do?



This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Hello,

For security reasons, what I would personally do is ask the developer to generate their own SSH Key Pair and provide you with the public key. Then you can upload their public key to your Droplet so that they could access it.

You can follow the steps on how to add a new SSH key to an existing Droplet here:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/how-to/add-ssh-keys/to-existing-droplet/

Hope that this helps!

Best,

Bobby

Hi @tevAngler,

You are correct, you should never share your private key. It’s like giving up the key to your house.

Why does your developer need it? I don’t see any reasons for it. They can ask for your public key which is fine, that’s the normal procedure HOWEVER asking for the private key it’s ridiculous.

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Start building today

From GPU-powered inference and Kubernetes to managed databases and storage, get everything you need to build, scale, and deploy intelligent applications.