About

An authentication agent is a ssh authentication component that serves private keys.

It is a background process that stores your private keys in memory, already decoded. (an encrypted key will be first decoded).

You then don't need to type the passphrase of your private key ever again.

Without an SSH Agent

The SSH agent is not mandatory to provide keys. You can pass keys:

• at the command line
• by storing them at default location (well known name)

See SSH public key authentication