ssh key invalid format message about cdk-ec2-key-pair HOT 2 CLOSED

Thanks for your reply and clarifying this is an AWS issue.

Also all you said is fair :) I thought it was worth asking also it might be useful to others as well to post this question here if they are looking for it. I can see that the key gets converted. Before it will start with:
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
and after with:
-----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----

I do use the private key to connect. Like it says in the blogposts I think the error message is just misleading. Also this is not an error but just a warning the connection is fine.

Just for completeness sake my ssh client runs on Windows with MinGW OpenSSH_8.3p1 and ssh server is OpenSSH_8.2p1 on Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS.

Maybe I will ask the AWS support about this but here I will close the issue. Cheers!

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Hi @kkaiser,

the KeyPair is generated by AWS via API. So if there is anything wrong it probably cannot and should not be fixed in this package. When you manually generate a PEM key in the AWS EC2 console, you should see the same exact thing.

ssh-keygen -f root_key.pem -p -y

From my understanding, this command will convert the PEM/RSA key to an RFC 4716/SSH2 key. Don't know why this would make a difference. Both keys are valid. But the "error" message also said that it attempted to load the key as a public key. Of course, then this will fail since it's a private key.

ssh is a bit stupid at times. Maybe it just understands the OpenSSH format better in that case and does not attempt to load it as a pub key. I don't know. But I also cannot reproduce that message here. The original keys don't cause any such message.

Cheers,
Daniel

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