TinyTERM for iPad 1.2.0, released on August 3, 2011, will give the message “Error reading public key” on some SSH connections. This is due to a bug in the switch that controls public key authentication. That switch state doesn’t get properly saved if you hit the Done button instead of Connect.

We have a workaround which will fix the problem. Go to TinyTERM’s Configure menu and select your connection. Tap the Manage SSH Keys button. In the resulting screen, turn on the Use public key switch. Hit the Back button. Tap Manage SSH Keys again and turn off public key. Hit Back again, then hit Connect. TinyTERM will connect using password authentication.

You can also work around this problem by disabling RSA authentication on the server. To disable RSA on the host, go to its /etc/ssh directory and edit the sshd_config file. Look for the following two lines:

RSAAuthentication yes
PubkeyAuthentication yes

Change “yes” to “no” on each line. The lines may also be commented out with the # character. If so, remove it from the beginning of the line when making the change. Restart the SSH daemon after making the change.

TinyTERM for iPad version 1.2.1 has been uploaded as well. It became available on August 8. It fixes that switch, and adds in an authentication search for SSH. If the initial authentication fails, it will try the next method made available by the server, and so on, until all available methods have been tried.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 8th, 2011 at 7:21 am and is filed under iOS, SSH. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.