Unable to load Private Key. (PEM routines:PEM_read_bio:no start line:pem_lib.c:648:Expecting: ANY PRIVATE KEY)

Question

I have a .key file which is PEM formatted private key file. I didn\'t make this file but I got this from somewhere.

I wanted to see its MD5 hash with openssl tool li

Answer 1

In our case what caused the issue is that the private key we were trying to use was encrypted with a passphrase.

We had to decrypt the private key using ssh-keygen -p before we could use the private key with the openssl command line tool.