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

I changed the header and footer of the PEM file to

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

and

-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

Finally, it works!

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Had same issue today, and noticed that this occurs when owner/group of file is not the one running app that reads key. Maybe is your issue too.

Answer 5

Resolution on my side. Change Encoding to UTF8 without BOM

Answer 6

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.