Question

I am using ganymed SSH2 java library to connect to a server using public key authentication.
I have created the public/private key pair and uploaded the public key (mykey.pub) to my server in the /.ssh2 directory. I have the private key on my machine locally.

Info on keys: 2048-bit dsa key pair (ssh2)

I am doing something like this:

File keyfile = new File("C:\\keys\\mykey");                  
String keyfilePass = "a"; // will be ignored if not needed

        try
        {

            Connection conn = new Connection(hostname);
            conn.connect();


            boolean isAuthenticated = conn.authenticateWithPublicKey("myusername", keyfile, keyfilePass); 
           //I get an error at this line

The error I am getting is:

Caused by: java.io.IOException: Invalid PEM structure, '-----BEGIN...' missing
    at ch.ethz.ssh2.crypto.PEMDecoder.parsePEM(PEMDecoder.java:138)

Can anyone help?
Is there any other library that works better than this?

EDIT: Key FILE

---- BEGIN SSH2 ENCRYPTED PRIVATE KEY ----
Subject: username    Comment: "2048-bit dsa, username@host, Tue Jul 31 2012 13:12:48 -\
0500"
KEY   
---- END SSH2 ENCRYPTED PRIVATE KEY ----

SOLUTION:

I figured the problem out, the key had to be converted to OPENSSH format (I used puttygen for that). This java library only accepts private keys in openssh format.

Answer 1

You can see for yourself that the key isn’t in the expected format. How did you generate it?