Saturday, December 12, 2020

public key authentication fails with agent refused operation

I generated a private+public key pair on a Windows 10 machine, copied the key over to a Linux Mint 18.03 (based on Ubuntu Xenial 16.04) machine and used it to ssh into that machine with no issues. Then I generated another key pair on another Windows 10 machine, which had been upgraded to 10 from a lower version of Windows, and tried to use that key pair to log on to that machine from the Linux machine, but it failed with "agent refused operation". 

Looked at various possible reasons for this failure, finally found that the private key was of a different size, and also had the string OpenSSH PRIVATE KEY instead of RSA PRIVATE KEY at the beginning and end. This might have been due to a different OpenSSH server from MLS software I had tried installing on the 2nd Windows machine, or it could have been due to something else. Anyway, I just created one more key from the 1st Windows machine and used that key pair instead for authenticating into the 2nd machine. That worked fine.

Edit - This discussion seems to be related, and has an explanation.

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