Recently I've seen a number of articles on suggested good ways to use SSH securely and other SSH tricks (unfortunately I can't find URLs to all of them, so I'm not going to try to put any here). As it happens I have a few modest suggestions on this, but before I started I wanted to make a broad meta-point about the use of personal SSH keys, aka SSH identities.

The big thing to understand about all advice about SSH personal keys is that when you choose to use personal keys for your own logins, you are deciding to balance convenience with security. After all, if security was your primary concern you would not use personal keys at all; you would use one time passwords with two-factor authentication.

(Things are different for cron'd scripts and the like, when there is no human there to interact with the system. I'm purely talking about using SSH identities to avoid typing passwords.)

Now, everyone has different views of the amount of security that they need and the convenience that they want. People fall along a spectrum between the two poles and where you wind up is not necessarily where I do. Thus, people's security advice about personal keys is not necessarily right for you even if it's correct (in some sense). The trick is to understand your particular tradeoffs and circumstances, to figure out what irritates you and what you need, and then to pick what works for you rather than blindly following someone else's suggestions and being either frustrated or dangerously insecure (in your environment) or both.

Yes, some things will make you less secure than others but they can also be more convenient (and vice versa). Sometimes this is the right tradeoff for you and sometimes it is not (even if it's the right tradeoff for me or whoever you're reading). And yes, there are some SSH tricks that usually increase both security and convenience. These are excellent things to know when you can find them.

(Sadly, my suggestions to come are not of this nature.)

PS: as always when you consider security related issues, you want to think about not just security in the abstract but security in the concrete in your environment with your risks.