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 like below command.
openssl rsa -in server.key -modulus -noout
But this generates below error.
unable to load Private Key
13440:error:0906D06C:PEM routines:PEM_read_bio:no start line:.\crypto\pem\pem_lib.c:648:Expecting: ANY PRIVATE KEY
Here's some asn1parse of the .key file.
openssl asn1parse -in server.key
0:d=0 hl=4 l= 603 cons: SEQUENCE
4:d=1 hl=2 l= 1 prim: INTEGER :00
7:d=1 hl=3 l= 129 prim: INTEGER :C141201603899993919CBAA56985E9C7
C6A2AF713A02F5FE88D38CEFBED9304599689280B84B0AB577A9719CA20DDA1246A894AF397A2C57
EE5A582B036CC367E3667454DCD82DBDBF187C35FE39F61C71B517DDDF576F5471B4EC2E045E0F9D
619F5616C4E832F00CBD0DBF41B4BA3CBC4B4B603AE1FE61965917DA732E0DEF
139:d=1 hl=2 l= 3 prim: INTEGER :010001
144:d=1 hl=3 l= 128 prim: INTEGER :1687B9AE67562CEDEBDD7A531B84CDB7
093CE138519B93C34B7F626076FF0A262B16EA71904ACB6251A39307C04ADE202055BA13DD9F1539
6123EE408183361A9BC08B9413FA360EA928E48CC3F52B33ACF2980758F02BA2139F652F30A257C2
2E45D7C25835FC4D22B9ECECC12AB632318D4F47E1EBDAD9781B96BCFF03A2D1
...
Is there anything more I can try?
I changed the header and footer of the PEM file to
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
and
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
Finally, it works!
Open the key file in Notepad++ and verify the encoding. If it says UTF-8-BOM then change it to UTF-8. Save the file and try again.
your .key file contains illegal characters. you can check .key file like this:
# file server.key
output "server.key: UTF-8 Unicode (with BOM) text" means it is a plain text, not a key file. The correct output should be "server.key: PEM RSA private key".
use below command to remove illegal characters:
# tail -c +4 server.key > new_server.key
The new_server.key should be correct.
For more detail, you can click here, thanks for the post.
> I have a .key file which is PEM formatted private key file.
> ...
> Here's some asn1parse of the .key file...
That it appears OK with asn1parse leads me to believe its not PEM encoded.
Is there anything more I can try?
Because it appears to be ASN.1, try:
$ openssl rsa -in server.key -inform DER -modulus -noout
Notice the -inform DER to switch between encodings.
Remove any whitespace at the start of the .key file.
Create CA certificate
c:\mycert>openssl genrsa -out privateKey.pem 4096
c:\mycert>openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -days 3600 -key privateKey.pem -out caKey.pem
I'm on Windows 10 and I saved my key with Windows1252 encoding and it worked for me. On another StackOverflow question some people were fixing this with UTF-8 with BOM.
In other words, it may be the file encoding.
Why not using cetificate bot
yum install epel-release
yum install certbot-nginx
Obtaining a Certificate
certbot --nginx -d example.com -d www.example.com
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18460035/unable-to-load-private-key-pem-routinespem-read-biono-start-linepem-lib-c6