A lot of times people think changing passwords is such a pain. I always look at it in terms of security – how many times has possible malfeasance had the chance to take place in the time that you have been using your password. Its also nice to look at it in terms of a review of where your password is stored. Change you password, everything that has it stored in some cache breaks. Its an A-ha! moment; too few of those in our daily lives. To make a game of it, think of it as a learning activity – how long does it take you to remember it without having to read it back, how long until you are not looking at the keyboard, how long until you have to actually think about your password because your muscles have retained it in memory. Compare to the last time – are you getting better or worse?
With that in mind, following are the instructions on changing a password where your password probably has not been changed in a while.
Changing your ssh key password with ssh-keygen
The -p option requests changing the passphrase of a private key file instead of creating a new private key. The program will prompt for the file containing the private key, for the old passphrase, and twice for the new passphrase. Use -f {filename} option to specifies the filename of the key file. For example, change directory to .ssh:
$ cd .ssh
To change your ssh-key passphrase, enter:
$ ssh-keygen -f id_{rsa or dsa} -p