Paramiko - connect with private key - not a valid OPENSSH private/public key file

You can convert id_rsa to an RSA type private key with ssh-keygen. I faced a similar situation and it worked for me.

To convert "BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY" to "BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY":

ssh-keygen -p -m PEM -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa

I have a Paramiko RSA key authentication setup running. Here is a summary of what I did:

• run ssh-keygen -t rsa to generate the id_rsa and id_rsa.pub files

• copy contents of id_rsa.pub into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys (on the target system)

• copy the id_rsa (private) keyfile onto the client machine

• (on the target I have mode 755 on .ssh/ and 644 on authorized_keys)

The following code runs a login using Paramiko:

import logging
import paramiko

logger = paramiko.util.logging.getLogger()
hdlr = logging.FileHandler('app.log')
formatter = logging.Formatter('%(asctime)s %(levelname)s %(message)s')
hdlr.setFormatter(formatter)
logger.addHandler(hdlr)
logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)

try:
    ssh = paramiko.SSHClient()
    ssh.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())
    k = paramiko.RSAKey.from_private_key_file('id_rsa')
    ssh.connect('160.100.28.216', username='edwards', pkey = k)
    sftp = ssh.open_sftp()
    sftp.chdir('/home/edwards')
except Exception, err:
    logging.debug(err)
    logging.info('Error connecting to Host')

The following is seen in the app.log file:

    2017-08-23 16:52:33,154 INFO Connected (version 2.0, client OpenSSH_6.6.1)
    2017-08-23 16:52:46,926 INFO Authentication (publickey) successful!
    2017-08-23 16:52:47,203 INFO [chan 0] Opened sftp connection (server version 3)

(NB: The Paramiko client is using the private key file.) This is all on Python 2.7.