Putty format to Key converter

[Matt Johnston]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2005 at 03:06:46PM +0300, Саша Дьяков wrote:
> I found out with Putty Key generator and found that the Dropbear can not convert Putty keys to its own format. So, OpenSSH keys can be converted only. It could be nice to add to dropbear converter Putty format also.
> 
> And please describe why are you use your own format for keys? With what it connected?

Dropbear uses a simple private key format that is close to
what is used within the SSH protocol for transmitting public
keys.  I've got OpenSSH private key conversion support since
people may have existing OpenSSH installs they want to
replace with Dropbear (particularly for keeping host keys
the same) - PuTTY is for a different platform, so that's not
such a big issue.

As far as I recall, PuTTY's key generator has a fairly easy
way to get OpenSSH format public keys (which is what
Dropbear uses natively) - that's what seems to be most
common on Unix platforms (excluding ssh.com). You can use
standard OpenSSH public keys for ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
public key authentication.

Matt