openssh/PROTOCOL.key

This document describes the private key format for OpenSSH.

1. Overall format

The key consists of a header, a list of public keys, and
an encrypted list of matching private keys.

#define AUTH_MAGIC      "openssh-key-v1"

	byte[]	AUTH_MAGIC
	string	ciphername
	string	kdfname
	string	kdfoptions
	uint32	number of keys N
	string	publickey1
	string	publickey2
	...
	string	publickeyN
	string	encrypted, padded list of private keys

2. KDF options for kdfname "bcrypt"

The options:

	string salt
	uint32 rounds

are concatenated and represented as a string.

3. Unencrypted list of N private keys

The list of privatekey/comment pairs is padded with the
bytes 1, 2, 3, ... until the total length is a multiple
of the cipher block size.

	uint32	checkint
	uint32	checkint
	byte[]	privatekey1
	string	comment1
	byte[]	privatekey2
	string	comment2
	...
	string	privatekeyN
	string	commentN
	byte	1
	byte	2
	byte	3
	...
	byte	padlen % 255

where each private key is encoded using the same rules as used for
SSH agent.

Before the key is encrypted, a random integer is assigned
to both checkint fields so successful decryption can be
quickly checked by verifying that both checkint fields
hold the same value.

4. Encryption

The KDF is used to derive a key, IV (and other values required by
the cipher) from the passphrase. These values are then used to
encrypt the unencrypted list of private keys.

5. No encryption

For unencrypted keys the cipher "none" and the KDF "none"
are used with empty passphrases. The options if the KDF "none"
are the empty string.

$OpenBSD: PROTOCOL.key,v 1.3 2022/07/01 04:45:50 djm Exp $