One of my servers is using openssh keypair authentication.

I used puttygen to generate a public key and a private key, and have been able to login to my server using the ppk file with putty.

But when I tried to import the ppk file into Xshell, it always says "Failed to import the user key!".



Program Ver. : Xshell 3.0

Putty uses its own user key format (not the default use key format) which is not supported by Xshell. We will consider adding a feature to allow importing Putty generated user keys.



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Technical Support

You can import the ppk in puttygen, then export to open ssh2 in menu conversions/export openssh key. The generated file can be imported into Xshell.

I generated a keypair with ssh 5.5 p1 and tried to import the public key into Xshell but it failed. This should be the standard OpenSSH format for the key so I do not understand why that would not be supported, vs PuTTY's propriety format.

Why would that have failed?

Xshell supports SECSH public key file format. To convert the public key into SECSH format, you can use the -e ssh-keygen option. For example, to convert a public key, "test.pub" to SECSH format, use:

# ssh-keygen -e test.pub


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Technical Support