Can I test authentication with an RSA key locally?

ssh rsa ssh-keys
pjmorse picture pjmorse · Oct 8, 2010 · Viewed 28.9k times · Source

Is there a way to check locally if you're providing the correct passphrase to an RSA key?

I recently had trouble pushing some commits to github because the push prompted for a password and then failed authentication. I verified that github had the correct public key for the id_rsa file in my ~/.ssh directory, and I verified that I could authenticate with Github (if you ssh [email protected] it will tell you you authenticated but that they don't offer shell access,) so I knew the problem was on my end, not Github's.

(I should point out that at this point I simply used git format-patch to get my commits as files, then blew away my working repository and re-cloned from Github, reapplied the patches using git am, and pushed without any trouble, so whatever the original problem was, it's fixed.)

This left me wondering, though: how would I know if an authentication problem with a remote host was me providing the wrong passphrase to my private key, or the remote host not recognizing my key? Is there a way to do a test authentication with the private key, locally, without trying to connect to a remote host?

Answer

gaborous picture gaborous · Mar 16, 2013

Or as pointed here: How can I test my ssh-keys locally without a server

You can do this:

ssh-keygen -y

And this doesn't require any server (works great with msysgit on Windows).

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