Tag Archives: ssh-keygen

How to fix “Nessus failed to load the SSH private key” error?

2 Replies

If you are using Nessus to scan Linux hosts and authenticate by key, you may encounter this problem.

You have generated the keys correctly, placed the public key on a remote server. You can connect to this server using the private key.

ssh -p22 -i private_key user@server.corporation.com

But when scanning with Nessus, you get weird errors in the various plugin outputs:

  • Target Credential Status by Authentication Protocol – Failure for Provided Credentials
  • Nessus failed to load the SSH private key. Is the associated passphrase correct?
  • Failed to parse the given key information.
  • Unable to login to remote host with supplied credential sets.
Continue reading →

SSH, SFTP, public key authentication and python

2 Replies

SFTP is a simple and fairly reliable way to share the information within the organization. Let’s look at the situation when you need to pick up some files from a remote host with authorization by public key. And after that, let’s see how to use it with in python.

ssh sftp python

Moreover, let’s see how to work with SSH using python and execute any commands on the remote host. For example. if we need it to collect versions of installed packages and a version Linux distribution for further vulnerability analysis (see “Vulnerability Assessment without Vulnerability Scanner“). 😉

Continue reading →