Are these public keys or private keys?
For public keys, you should be able to move them between systems with basic security in place
- copy them using scp/sftp for example. The content of the public key is not a secret.
If you are referring to private keys, I would suggest that rather than sharing the private
key between hosts you accept more than one public key on the servers to which you are
connecting - that or store your private keys on encrypted removable media and take them with
you (that is assuming these keys are being used by a physical user).
If these keys are being used by automated systems, you will probably want to look at
transporting using encrypted removable media - systems such as trucrypt
(
http://www.truecrypt.org/) and gnupg (
http://www.gnupg.org/) are available which have
mechanisms to allow you to do this.
Linux shell commands that might be entered to use GPG to create a compressed, encrypted file
containing a folder of keys might look like this:
tar czvf ~/keydir.tar.gz /etc/keydir
gpg -c ~/keydir.tar.gz -o /media/usbdrive/keydir.tar.gz.gpg
The gpg command will prompt you for a password which will be used as the encryption key.
Once you reach your target system, decrypt the gpg file and extract like so:
gpg /media/usbdrive/keydir.tar.gz.gpg -o ~/keydir.tar.gz
cd /
tar zxvf ~/keydir.tar.gz
You will need to have permissions to read/write to the relevant directories, and have the
following relevant applications installed (they should be available from your system's
package manager):
tar
gzip
gpg/gnupg
Hope this helps,
Jim
