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Are both Public and Private Keys necessary?
I would like to connect to my SSH server via public key. Why would the Drive Manager require both the public and private keys? It should only be necessary to include the private key (as the public key is stored on the SSH server)?
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Inappropriate?Tools like putty only ask for the private key - since the public key is put held by the server. why does sftpdrive not do the same thing? -
Inappropriate?Hi Andy,
Sorry about the delay in answer. In SFTPDrive / ExpanDrive for Windows you do need both the private key and the public key.
You are correct that the server holds a copy of the public key. However, the client need to be able to tell the the server what public key it wants to authenticate against. In SSH the way to identify a public key is with the public key itself. The server will then ask the client to prove that it has the private key.
I’m not sure how Putty works, but I strongly suspect that it has a copy of the public key somewhere.
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this answers the question
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Inappropriate?Putty forces the user to specify the login name when the SSH shell opens. At that point, the user enters his private key password and the private key is then presented to the server which authenticates it against the public key stored in the specific users ~/..ssh folder (e.g. /home/joe/.ssh/authorized_users).
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Inappropriate?The public key can be generated from the private key. Since this is the case you could say that the public key is "stored inside" the private key. I'm pretty sure that Putty only needs the private key because it extracts the public key from the private key. Even if this is not how Putty does it you could use this method for ExpanDrive.
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