Converting key between PEM and ASCII

[Damien Miller]

Al Banard wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I know its been a while but I just wanted to finish up this thread.
> I've now solved the problem by creating a seperate ssh V1 keypair
> and using a seperate hostname section in my conf file so that I
> can easily specify which private key to use by ssh-ing to a
> different host name.
> 
> What I was originally trying to do was use the ssh V2 keypair that
> I use most of the time with my HP 2512 switch. However my HP
> switch only supports the V1 protocol. The HP doco suggested that
> I could convert the public key from V2 to V1 and still use the same
> private key. The doco also suggested that a V2 public key tends
> to be PEM encoded or encoded in some way so that its not just
> digits. So I guess the V2 public key for openssh is ASCII but not
> the pure digit format the doco was referring to when it said ASCII.

We have never supported sharing of SSH protocol v.1 and v.2 keys. They
do different things in their respective protocols and we have never
received positive advice from a cryptographer saying that is is safe to
share them.

-d