appleboy / appleboy/drone-ssh

ssh-action@master fails with RSA key: invalid CRT coefficient

Open
#294 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Dominant language
Go
Stars
314
Forks
79
Avg merge
3m
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Description

When running a GitHub Actions workflow using appleboy/ssh-action@master, the SSH connection fails with the following error:

```
2025/12/02 05:42:09 ssh.ParsePrivateKey: crypto/rsa: invalid CRT coefficient
2025/12/02 05:42:10 ssh: handshake failed: ssh: unable to authenticate, attempted methods [none], no supported methods remain
Error: Process completed with exit code 1.
```

This happened consistently when attempting to connect to an EC2 instance using an RSA private key stored in GitHub Secrets.

## Workflow Configuration

Here is the step that caused the failure:

```yaml

- name: server connect
uses: appleboy/ssh-action@master
with:
host: ${{ secrets.TEST_SERVER_HOST }}
username: ec2-user
key: ${{ secrets.PRIVATE_KEY }}
timeout: 60s
port: 22
```

Once I downgraded to: `appleboy/ssh-action@v1.2.3` the problem was resolved.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Research direction

Start by reproducing the GitHub Actions workflow with the RSA private key from the issue on appleboy/ssh-action@master, then compare its behavior with v1.2.3. Trace the handling of the private key and the reported invalid CRT coefficient; done means the master version authenticates successfully without requiring a downgrade.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
github-actions, go
Domain
ci-cd, devops
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.