The keys are identified and operated on by keygrip, and the keygrip for a key is the same whether it is a subkey or a standalone key. This longer process is required because there is no clean way to delete the GPG key in the keyring that is just the SSH key. Unfortunately, making this newly added key a subkey is not a one-step process. The Monkeysphere Project provides a utility, pem2openpgp, that does this for you. To add the key, you need to convert the key format from the Privacy-Enhanced Mail (PEM)-encoded format that SSH uses to an OpenPGP-formatted certificate.

Doing this has allowed me to eliminate nine other key files, reducing my backup/privacy footprint a lot. This will eliminate the need for private key files.

A way around this is to import your existing SSH keys into your GPG key. And, if you're like me, you also don't want to have to log into every server you use to update the authorized_keys file. If you're like me, you already have one or more existing SSH keys. In the first article in this series, I explained how to use your GPG key to authenticate your SSH connections.

Gpg servers gpgwin