CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sshopenssh
Fredrik Wendt
Fredrik Wendt

Reputation: 1128

How can I validate a potential public ssh key part?

I'm building a small service where users may upload their public SSH key in order to access a Mercurial repository (via SSH). I'd like to verify that whatever the users paste is:

From what I understand, ssh-keygen -l -f ... doesn't say whether the key part inspected is the public or private part.

Is there a way to verify that a file does not contain/represent the private part of a key pair?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 680

Answers (1)

Fredrik Wendt
Fredrik Wendt

Reputation: 1128

It turns out that ssh-keygen -l -f private_key will look for a matching public_key in the same directory as private_key and use that if found. But if there is no such (by name) matching public key part, the private_file will be tried and the program complains. So the command I thought couldn't be used, can in fact be used (as long as there's no public key part in a file next to it with a matching name).

Upvotes: 1

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