Different kinds of SSH Keys 😮

Workday June 7th, 2023 1 minute read.

Usually with Workday integrations, it's relatively straightforward to just hand over a publish SSH key generated in Workday and it typically just "works". Recently though, I got stuck and setting up SSH keys for file transfers wasn't "just" working.

Creating a key pair in Workday results in a key like:

--BEGIN SSH2 PUBBLIC KEY--
AAA...
...
--END SSH2 PUBLIC KEY--

But the Workday key wasn't working out of the box with the vendor. Through some trial and error, I found the key needed to be "OpenSSH" formatted to work on their side.

ssh-rsa
AAA...
...

The solution -

Copy the SSH2 public key into a file named "id.pub"
Open a terminal window, cd into the folder with that file and type ssh-keygen -i -f id.pub | pbcopy to copy the OpenSSH version of the key to your clipboard.