Plesk and GitHub auto deployment RSA keys error

Question

As of March 15, 2022, Github has removed RSA keys.

https://github.blog/2021-09-01-improving-git-protocol-security-github/

I was using auto deployment over plesk (windows)

How can I use it with the SHA-2 keys method?

---

I am using a dedicated server. I have access to the server.

.ssh\id_rsa

.ssh\id_rsa.pub

I can update these files. but i don't know how to do

Answer 1

It is not the case that GitHub has removed support for RSA keys. GitHub still supports RSA keys just fine. The situation is that an RSA SSH key can be used with one of three algorithms: SHA-1, SHA-256, and SHA-512. The former is very weak, and the latter two are considered strong. GitHub does not allow keys uploaded after a certain date to use RSA with SHA-1 because that is insecure. The same key can be used with any algorithm, but the decision is made based on what the client supports.

It sounds like the Plesk environment you're using doesn't support RSA with SHA-256 or SHA-512, and so that's not going to work. You should probably contact your web host and let them know that this is a problem.

In the mean time, you can try using a different kind of key. Instead of generating an RSA key, you can generate an Ed25519 key: ssh-keygen -t ed25519. That will usually be stored in ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub (for the public key) and ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 (for the private key). This is the recommended SSH key option for all uses by GitHub and more generally by Mozilla.

It may be that the software you're using doesn't support Ed25519, in which case, you could try an ECDSA key. That would be generated with ssh-keygen -t ecdsa -b 256, and the files would contain id_ecdsa instead of id_ed25519.

If none of that works, you can try using HTTPS instead, possibly with a personal access token. However, in such a situation, I would recommend finding a better web host that has a more up to date environment. Avoiding the use of SHA-1 is ultimately for security reasons, and if your web host has poor security practices in one area, they probably have them elsewhere.