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

From: Peter Gutmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 02:49:00 +1300

[email-masked] (=?iso-8859-1?q?Niels_M=F6ller?=)

>It doesn't look like a central piece of the infrastructure. So at least I
>wouldn't mind having it changed now.

Oh, in that case I'd be all for it - I had the feeling there'd be grumblings
about "It's too late to change now".

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

Yup.  See RFC 1113 for the general specification.

Peter.

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From: Jon Bright <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 14:59:08 +0100

> about "It's too late to change now".

It is a little late, especially since this is the only way of portably 
getting keys around the place.  If implementors are advised to handle 
reading both formats for a transitory period, I guess that would be 
enough to keep users quiet (though generating a key with new-version of 
App A and not being able to get App B to use it is still a bit of an 
interop disaster...)

-- 
Jon Bright
Silicon Circus Ltd.
http://www.siliconcircus.com

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From: [email-masked] (Niels Möller)
Date: 13 Feb 2004 15:33:13 +0100

> about "It's too late to change now".

I would feel that way if this text format were part of the "core
drafts", but it's not.

The recently expired draft-ietf-secsh-publickeyfile-04.txt is the
latest specification for the public key file format, right?

> Yup.  See RFC 1113 for the general specification.

It would make some sense to have the SSH2 public key file spec refer
to RFC 1421 (the successor of RFC 1113).

Regards,
/Niels

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From: "Jeff P. Van Dyke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 08:02:00 -0700

From: "Niels Möller" <[email-masked]>
> latest specification for the public key file format,
right?

A note from 11/13/03 that was posted to ietf-ssh says that
this
draft was in Last Call.  I'm not sure what happened after
that.

--Jeff