Purpose of Publickey file

[Damien Miller]

On Fri, 10 Mar 2006, ponraj wrote:

> Hello All,
> 
> I'm using OpenSSH 4.2p1 and I have a question regarding the usage of host 
> keys in OpenSSH. The host keys (both private and public) are stored in etc 
> directory. But when sshd loads the key, it reads only private key and 
> generates the public key from it. Is there any reason for having the public 
> host key along with the private key in the etc directory?

Yes, so users can manually add them to their known_hosts files or verify
them out of band.

(notice that the public keys are world readable for that reason)

-d