Key Pair Conversion Openssh => SSH2

[Markus Friedl]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2002 at 12:12:20PM -0800, Bob Smith wrote:
> i find it amusing that the OpenBSD web site states on the main index page 
> "Our efforts emphasize portability, standardization,...." but by not 
> following standards like secsh's key format you're failing according to 
> your own goals.

This is not exactly the truth.

You have to consider your user base before you consider switching to a
completely different key format and make their life harder.  This is why
OpenSSH uses a one-key-per-line representation of the public key (for
all protocol versions).

OpenSSH tries to make switching to protocol v2 easy for existing users
and not as hard as possible.

You should also remember the history: back when protocol v2 support was
added to OpenSSH there was not standard (not even a documentation) for
the IETF-SECSH key format you are referring to.  However, we provide
tools for converting keys.