IIRC, the gpg-agent is sadly not that capable or intelligent. In theory, it should be usable for this. In practice, I believe the agent actually just retrieves

IIRC, the gpg-agent is sadly not that capable or intelligent. In theory, it should be usable for this. In practice, I believe the agent actually just retrieves the passphrase and hands it to the requesting program, which is then responsible for actually working with the private key. So it doesn't keep your keys safely out of the hands of 'normal' programs, even though it seems like it should. Although it is somewhat confusing, and gpg-agent seems to mediate access to smartcards. Protocol docs here: https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg/Agent-Protocol.html https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg/Agent-Prot... The ssh-agent, on the other hand, does keep the key material out of the ssh client executable.