--- title: SSH certificates and git signing | daily.dev description: SSH certificates can be used to cryptographically sign git commits, offering advantages over OpenPGP and X.509 alternatives. The setup requires configuring... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/ssh-certificates-and-git-signing-xbor3hzac twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: SSH certificates and git signing | daily.dev og:description: SSH certificates can be used to cryptographically sign git commits, offering advantages over OpenPGP and X.509 alternatives. The setup requires configuring... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/ssh-certificates-and-git-signing-xbor3hzac og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/XBoR3hZAC.png og:image:alt: SSH certificates and git signing og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # SSH certificates and git signing **[Lobsters](https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters)** · 8 min read · 6 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary SSH certificates can be used to cryptographically sign git commits, offering advantages over OpenPGP and X.509 alternatives. The setup requires configuring git's gpg namespace to use SSH, and a custom tool can help locate the right certificate from an SSH agent. Validating signatures locally works via ssh-keygen's authorized-keys format, but neither GitHub nor GitLab currently support trusting commits signed by a CA-issued SSH certificate, so a custom CI validation script is provided. For stronger security, private keys can be stored in hardware (TPM on Linux/Windows, Secure Enclave on Mac) using tools like Secretive or a custom TPM agent built on go-attestation. The TPM agent also generates attestation artifacts to prove a key was hardware-generated, which is valuable in agentic/bot environments. SSH certificate infrastructure can be reused from existing SSH auth setups. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@allinonetools** · 1 upvotes > Using SSH certs for git signing is a nice upgrade, especially if you already have SSH infra in place. Hardware-backed keys + CI validation make it much more practical for real teams even without GitHub/GitLab support yet. ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Jan-Piet Mens :: SSH certificates: the better SSH experience](https://daily.dev/posts/jan-piet-mens-ssh-certificates-the-better-ssh-experience-f1ftumowi) · Jan-Piet Mens · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#security](https://daily.dev/tags/security), [#git](https://daily.dev/tags/git), [#ssh](https://daily.dev/tags/ssh) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/ssh-certificates-and-git-signing-xbor3hzac) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"SSH certificates and git signing","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/ssh-certificates-and-git-signing-xbor3hzac","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/ssh-certificates-and-git-signing-xbor3hzac"},"datePublished":"2026-03-23T02:44:41.107Z","dateModified":"2026-03-23T02:45:08.173Z","description":"SSH certificates can be used to cryptographically sign git commits, offering advantages over OpenPGP and X.509 alternatives. 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