PuTTY wish key-formats

summary: Support for OpenSSH and ssh.com SSH-2 private key formats
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: fun: Just needs tuits, and not many of them.
priority: medium: This should be fixed one day.
fixed-in: 2002-06-15 0.53 (0.54) (0.55) (0.56) (0.57) (0.58) (0.59) (0.60) (0.61) (0.62)

Although PuTTY shares the same SSH-1 private key file format as OpenSSH and ssh.com's product, all the SSH-2 formats are different. Of course, we believe PuTTY's is the best, because it shows the public key unencrypted (so it's easy to check by eye that a particular private key matches a particular public key) and because it's fully tamperproofed to protect against any attacks that involve tampering with the key to reveal information about it.

However, a lot of people want to be able to use their OpenSSH or ssh.com private keys (usually OpenSSH) with PuTTY. So we probably need at least PuTTYgen to be able to load and save those formats. (I think if we build the conversion capability into PuTTYgen, there will be no need to bloat PuTTY itself with the same code.)

Update: As of 2002-06-15, PuTTYgen supports import/export of both OpenSSH and ssh.com key formats.

Audit trail for this wish.

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(last revision of this bug record was at 2005-03-10 16:36:42 +0000)