Imagine for a moment that ssh became illegal. Is it even possible for the tech economy to continue? What would that look like? My head hurts. Actually, think of what Attorney General Barr said: Corporations should have access to strong encryption, just not little people. In that horrifying sort of world, there would be encryption licenses perhaps. And general purpose computing would be under a large threat. It is so…
It’d probably be some new PKI on top of SSH where your private key would be held in escrow by an identity provider. e.g. Your username is your email address, and your email provider retains your key pair. It’d probably be portrayed as an improved key management solution that allows more frequent key rotations and revocations. Might even start with being required for government projects, resulting in supported impleme…
There's only a small problem here: the SSH private key is not used to encrypt the connection. It's used solely to authenticate the connection. The key used to actually encrypt and authenticate the data is an ephemeral key derived through a Diffie-Hellman key exchange during the connection establishment. That is, having the SSH private key does not allow one to decrypt the data after the fact. The only thing having the SSH private key allows is doing a MITM attack, and since SSH does mutual authentication, the attacker would need to have the private key for both ends of the connection.