Re: [libssh2] userauth_publickey question

On Tue, Nov 27, 2007 at 06:39:04PM -0800, George King wrote:
> Can someone please explain why libssh2 requires both the public and
> private keys to authenticate a transaction?

It's probably not intentional.

> it strikes me as contrary to my (very limited) understanding of
> SSH.

It has less to do with SSH and more to do with the particular
asymmetric crypto algorithm.

For RSA, the public key can be easily computed if the private key
is known. The reverse is not true. This is the essence of RSA.

> At the very least, it is less convenient than the other methods I
> have encountered.

Agreed. It should be fairly easy to add code that computes the public
key from the private key.

> Thanks for all your work! I am happy to have found this library,
> and I hope to use it extensively in my work.

I'm new to it too but like it as well. Subsystems in OpenSSH are very
useful but it's great to also have the option of an SSH library. :)
These are still fairly early days of the library though, so there are
many things to do.

//Peter

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Received on 2007-11-28