Re: Bug? in SSH public key file format

[nisse%lysator.liu.se@localhost (Niels Möller)]

Peter Gutmann <pgut001%cs.auckland.ac.nz@localhost> writes:

> >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?

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.

> (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).

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