Disclaimer: This post is primarily aimed at myself. No information here that can’t be found via google.
I’ve been using the same ssh public/private key for about 5 years and probably a minimum of three OS reinstalls.
Since that time, my personal password policy has changed. Gone are the times of easy, memorable passwords. I use 1Password to manage all my passwords.
Since I have no reason to believe that my private key has been compromised, I thought it might be time to change the password on the key.
To change the password on an ssh private key, use the ssh-keygen command, that you probably already used to create the key in the first place.
$ ssh-keygen -p -f ~/.ssh/id_rsaThe lower-case p-param will ask ssh-keygen to change the passphrase of the file that is passed as an argument to -f.
On that account, I also changed the hostname in the public part of the key to reflect my current machine. Just edit ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub in a text editor and change the hostname at the end of the key. It is just an identifier after all.