Subject: Re: Bug? in SSH public key file format

From: Peter Gutmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 00:39:18 +1300

Jakob Schlyter <[email-masked]> writes:
>On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 [email-masked] wrote:
>> The "SSH Public Key File Format" draft currently says:
>>
>> >The first line of a conforming key file MUST be a begin marker, which is the
>> >literal text:
>> >
>> >---- BEGIN SSH2 PUBLIC KEY ----
>>
>> It might be a good idea to point out in the text that this is unlike any
other
>> known (standardised) use of this type of tagging (PGP, OpenPGP, X.509, PKCS
>> #10, CRLs, etc etc etc) which all use 5 dashes and no space, e.g:
>>
>> [...]
>
>or perhaps change the format to use 5 dashes and no space?

And given the deployed code base what are the chances of that happening?

(Actually if that gets fixed then using a PEM-style blank line as a delimiter
rather than just running the header into the body would also be a good idea,
because at the moment one-pass processing isn't possible).

Peter.

---

From: [email-masked] (Niels Möller)
Date: 13 Feb 2004 14:07:12 +0100

> And given the deployed code base what are the chances of that happening?

Don't know. Most implementations use their own keyformats anyway, at
least in some places. The standard text format seems to be used mainly
as a common format when moving keys between systems using different
implementations. It doesn't look like a central piece of the
infrastructure. So at least I wouldn't mind having it changed now.

> because at the moment one-pass processing isn't possible).

Trying to be precise, is this the format you're proposing?

-----BEGIN SSH2 PUBLIC KEY-----
Comment: "768-bit dsa"
Foo: Optional header section
Bar: terminated by a mandatory empty line

AAAAB3NzaC1kc3MAAABhAJw3J7CMyAKiX8F1Mz1dNguVQi7VZQQrLl8DeWNQaSkqmIPjsc
zSn4Cjv9BOt8FM46AZbw+aSou0jpiFPJJiQjpT5U1ArPLoMqRpopqcZqcVubRKALTzytgw
vvXyoHb84wAAABUAmm14nnnHQtwx5ZUgRrjv98iv4KcAAABgENZmq1qm4jdJJB7IAC5Ecr
vcjhlACNcPD4UQ0Bgk66/MJOxvrwf0V+ZtTfb8ZaQlKdu84vB2VxVcB8zo0ds01I6eLG2f
/nDENvwp0TkNKf1uyEWPjNQGI/ImAqukiSWjAAAAYDe6o/C8faYCpuduLPQrl8Co6z7HgC
yIaRCzBjD8bY6L5qZp4G//8PVJVhxXh3vAS6LbgDCFoa2HZ1/vxHpML+gl3FPjAOxZPs27
B2CTISEmV3KYx5NJpyKC3IBw/ckP6Q==
-----END SSH2 PUBLIC KEY-----

/Niels