Re: Bug? in SSH public key file format

[Peter Gutmann <pgut001%cs.auckland.ac.nz@localhost>]

Jakob Schlyter <jakob%rfc.se@localhost> writes:
>On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 pgut001%cs.auckland.ac.nz@localhost 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.