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Cannot parse Private Keys from PuttyGen?

See original GitHub issue

Are the private keys generated from PuttyGen not compatible with ssh2?

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

The private keys that are generated (SSH-2 RSA) look like this:

PuTTY-User-Key-File-2: ssh-dss
Encryption: none
Comment: dsa-key-20141119
Public-Lines: 18
AAAAB3NzaC1kc3MAAAEBALRAc0iurfC9QcN8svhWZ696BsMwCSqlh4lB7SgUfhsI
7qClbw+5Lf4xUHjy0/851/a/iL4wPa5pEpN35cql8JTOfVdukhOPUqyiZzdxNdWC
IY9xu0DDQjRmkKQ5QSumbVggWyTe/Td1nbQlMT4RcQBDut1viKLueWkWsecj0vLJ
wGI1P80Vwz+FgMY/9mRJjPZl0nZAhi791/Ig3N6Nyq8ecAA+Z+KNa6Dj6g96GslU
H9hZbviuPaoFnaaq150rZBo6owe2CI7ITofS30jNL8LuFeaQg9P51/39YLi6RNS4
0zyiSWhFw+S/m9GayzwGGQQyCUoaxSCRo7//WxxMPCEAAAAVAO6ae6AgEuerk0Wa
/HfbwxbsPOHzAAABAHPoUUfiIl16qFb9SzpTDPuo0ZxChX9zbkL8Y+vDo1k4664P
--- redacted ---
Private-Lines: 1
AAAAFHhl3RpT/xmScMoRL2RcA5z6gGO3
Private-MAC: 3617639b950751ab5149bdbf8b88044b6af394f1

I get this error message:

[Error: Cannot parse privateKey: Unsupported key format]

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 9 years ago
Comments:19 (8 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

1reaction

mscdexcommented, Jun 22, 2015

@ganna-shmatova That’s not for generating PuTTY keys, that’s for generating a TLS certificate (for the server). Those are two different things. As far as I know the only way to generate PuTTY keys is to use PuTTYGen, which can save out to the .PPK key format.

1reaction

unknownbracketscommented, Nov 19, 2014

You want it to start like this:

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

Using PuTTYgen, load the existing key, and then select Conversions -> Export OpenSSH key. This file should work fine. You’ll want this version for other tools as well.

That being said, supporting PuTTY style keys might be a useful feature request for some, I suppose. In fact, there’s a TODO for it.

-[Unknown]

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