Venafi SSH Protect

Venafi SSH Protect, now offered by CyberArk as SSH Manager for Machines, discovers and manages the SSH keys that administrators, applications and automated processes use to access servers. Unmanaged SSH keys never expire by default and are often copied, forgotten or orphaned, which gives attackers a quiet path for lateral movement.

The product scans Linux and Unix hosts to inventory authorized keys, private keys and trust relationships, then identifies risky conditions such as weak algorithms, duplicate keys, root access, keys belonging to former employees and unused trust. Administrators can rotate keys, remove unauthorized ones and enforce policies for key length, algorithm and allowed source hosts. SSH Protect can also act as an SSH certificate authority, issuing short-lived SSH certificates instead of static keys, and all changes are logged for audit.

Security and infrastructure teams use it to close SSH-based backdoors, meet audit requirements for privileged access in PCI DSS, SOX and NIST frameworks, and automate SSH key hygiene across large server estates.