Hi Giovanni--

Thanks for the report!

On 03/15/2011 12:26 PM, Giovanni Mascellani wrote:
> It seems that ssh-add is unable to import a key from a pipe on
> my system, thus making "monkeysphere s" not working.

This is http://bugs.debian.org/614897, which already has a patch for
OpenSSH to resolve the issue.  Feel free to poke that bug and encourage
the fix of the root problem, or upstream at:

 https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1869

> I don't know why you prefer to use a pipe instead of a temporary
> file, but the attached patch fixes this issue.

The material being passed through this file is unlocked secret key
material.  We would rather not write that data to the filesystem as a
temporary file for a couple reasons:

 * most filesystems don't actually remove the data from the disk when
the temporary files are unlinked.  FIFOs, otoh, write nothing to disk on
any filesystem i've heard of.

 * while the file exists, multiple processes can read from it.  data
written to a FIFO gets read by at most one reader (ideally the ssh-add
process)

So i'd prefer to not regress to writing to a temporary file if we can
just get the underlying problem fixed instead.

Regards,

        --dkg

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