Can't access SFTP with SSH Key having a password

[qmachard]

Hi,

First, good job for this useful and amazing tool !!

So, I can't connect me to a server in SFTP with my private key having a password. It's ok when I remove the password from my ssh key but I've would like to have one 😉

* SSH MD5 fingerprint: a926164b3ca7b2a093cd93050e3a7ff2
* SSH authentication methods available: publickey,password,keyboard-interactive
* Using SSH private key file '/Users/me/.ssh/id_rsa'
* SSH public key authentication failed: Unable to extract public key from private key file: Wrong passphrase or invalid/unrecognized private key file format
* No identity would match
* Authentication failure
* Closing connection 0

I'm on macOS Sierra 10.12.4 (16E195)

Thank you,
Bye.

[mkllnk]

Yes, that would be great. Thank you for reporting.

[martisj]

@qmachard can you please share your .git/config? I can't get sftp working with a key with/without password.

[LukasFritzeDev]

I just found this in the curl manual:

Get a file from an SSH server using SCP using a private key (password-protected) to authenticate:

    curl -u username: --key ~/.ssh/id_rsa --pass private_key_password \ 
         scp://example.com/~/file.txt

It might help here.

[LukasFritzeDev]

So what would be the best logic to implement this?

1. Introduce a new option/config --key-pass which must be set explicitly.
2. Set this from the already existing --passwd (or any other method of setting a password) only if a password and a private key are set at the same time. But this has potential to lead to some unexpected behaviour in some use cases.

[mkllnk]

At first, I preferred option 1 to reduce the potential for conflict. But then I thought that some people may prefer to enter their password instead of storing it. If we use the current password, we can reuse all the logic, keychain usage and so on. I would go for that as it's much simpler.

[rraallvv]

Is this related t this issue?

* SSH authentication methods available: publickey
* Using SSH public key file '/Users/user/.ssh/id_rsa.pub'
* Using SSH private key file '/Users/user/.ssh/id_rsa'
* SSH public key authentication failed: Callback returned error
* No identity would match
* Authentication failure
* Closing connection 0

Please notice the error is different, Callback returned error, and that id_rsa.pub is already in the ~/.ssh directory

Edit:

There are cases (debian-based distros) when your libssh2 is built with libgcrypt. In those, use PEM-encoded private key file in .git/conf:

$ openssl rsa -in ~/.ssh/id_rsa -outform pem > ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pem

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/17884284