OpenSSL unable to load Public Key

Question

Trying to encrypt a text message via command line on OSX Yosomite 10.10.2

Created public .pem key like this:

ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub         


        

Answer 1

I had same problem when I was extracting public key from certificate.

openssl x509 -pubkey -noout -in cert.crt > pubKey.pem

Afterwards, I wanted to print information about key with command below.

openssl rsa -text -pubin -in pubKey.pem

And gets an error: unable to load Public Key

Solution

I opened pubKey.pem in notepad++ and in the Encoding menu was UCS-2 LE BOM selected. So I changed it to UTF-8 encoding. Size of pubKey.pem was half of the original one after changing encoding. Then it works like charm.

Tested in Windows and powershell