Key Pair Conversion Openssh => SSH2

[Bob Smith]

i do realize that openssh was around long before the secsh draft, and as i 
said in the last thread i don't really know which key format is better, it 
seems to me they both have their benefits. i raised this issue again only 
because it seems that not a week goes by without someone posting a question 
about key formats... people are obviously confused about this. and just to 
agree with your next point, yes, people are confused about a lot of things, 
but when the confusion is caused by not following a standard then that's 
something that can be fixed with out the user needing a lobotomy.

i'm really not trying to bash anyone here, i do appreciate the work done by 
the openbsd team, but since it is the open source community that is 
continually harassing and belittling corporations for not following open 
standards i really think that the open source community should make 
following standards the number two priority, before functionality, before 
performance and before portability... i'll give you that security should 
come first.


>From: Markus Friedl <markus at openbsd.org>
...
>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.



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