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That is true - it's probably more secure than storing them in the process, but several of these side-channel attacks can apply to kernel space (depending on hardware and security patches applied).

It's also not portable - OpenSSH runs on non-x86 architectures, and they might not have spare basically unused registers lying around.

Finally, I'm not sure the x87 registers have enough space to fit these keys. You have 8 80-bit registers, for a total of 640 bits. Your typical SSH private key might be 2048 bits or more.

So it's a fun and creative line of thinking, but probably not practical in this case.



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