dropbear ssh server won't let me connect

I'm trying to gain ssh access to my router. Currently I only have telnet access and I installed dropbear and is running (using opkg on a usb drive connected to the router). From the beginning, what I did was generate a private key and decrypt it (since dropbear doesn't support this yet) and the public one: cd .ssh openssl genrsa -des3 -out id_rsa openssl rsa -in id_rsa -out id_rsa ssh-keygen -y -f id_rsa > authorized_keys I uploaded the public key (authorized_keys) to /root/.ssh. I put the file on a Apache server (in my local computer) and download it on the router using wget (so the downloaded file gets root as owner/group) and then changed the permissions to 0600 (same for the client but with my user). When I try to access, it gives me a "Permission denied (publickey)" error: $ ssh -v -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa root@192.168.1.1 OpenSSH_7.4p1, OpenSSL 1.0.2j 26 Sep 2016 debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config debug1: Connecting to 192.168.1.1 [192.168.1.1] port 22. debug1: Connection established. debug1: key_load_public: No such file or directory debug1: identity file /home/chazy/.ssh/id_rsa type -1 debug1: key_load_public: No such file or directory debug1: identity file /home/chazy/.ssh/id_rsa-cert type -1 debug1: Enabling compatibility mode for protocol 2.0 debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_7.4 debug1: Remote protocol version 2.0, remote software version dropbear debug1: no match: dropbear debug1: Authenticating to 192.168.1.1:22 as 'root' debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT sent debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT received debug1: kex: algorithm: curve25519-sha256@libssh.org debug1: kex: host key algorithm: ssh-rsa debug1: kex: server->client cipher: aes128-ctr MAC: hmac-sha1 compression: none debug1: kex: client->server cipher: aes128-ctr MAC: hmac-sha1 compression: none debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_KEX_ECDH_REPLY debug1: Server host key: ssh-rsa SHA256:1EFA75uwLp+4hBW0t3aaY05QjLzYd4jjDWoULAzF/8o debug1: Host '192.168.1.1' is known and matches the RSA host key. debug1: Found key in /home/chazy/.ssh/known_hosts:1 debug1: rekey after 4294967296 blocks debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS sent debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS received debug1: rekey after 4294967296 blocks debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_ACCEPT received debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey debug1: Next authentication method: publickey debug1: Trying private key: /home/chazy/.ssh/id_rsa debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey debug1: No more authentication methods to try. Permission denied (publickey). Unless I'm misreading what the documentation (GitHub repo ) says: > Server public key auth: > > You can use ~/.ssh/authorized_keys in the same way as with OpenSSH, > just put the key entries in that file. They should be of the form: > > ssh-rsa > AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEAwVa6M6cGVmUcLl2cFzkxEoJd06Ub4bVDsYrWvXhvUV+ZAM9uGuewZBDoAqNKJxoIn0Hyd0Nk/yU99UVv6NWV/5YSHtnf35LKds56j7cuzoQpFIdjNwdxAN0PCET/MG8qyskG/2IE2DPNIaJ3Wy+Ws4IZEgdJgPlTYUBWWtCWOGc= > someone@hostname > > You must make sure that ~/.ssh, and the key file, are only writable by > the user. Beware of editors that split the key into multiple lines. > > Dropbear supports some options for authorized_keys entries, see the > manpage. I did everything it says, so I don't know where the problem could be. The documentation mentions another way: > Client public key auth: > > Dropbear can do public key auth as a client, but you will have to > convert OpenSSH style keys to Dropbear format, or use dropbearkey to > create them. > > If you have an OpenSSH-style private key ~/.ssh/id_rsa, you need to > do: > > dropbearconvert openssh dropbear ~/.ssh/id_rsa ~/.ssh/id_rsa.db > dbclient -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.db > > Dropbear does not support encrypted hostkeys though can connect to > ssh-agent. So this menas that if I convert the private key to a dropbear private key, I can use the dropbear client to connect to the dropbear server: dropbearconvert openssh dropbear id_rsa id_rsa.db I'm going to give this a try and see if it works. But anyways, Server public key auth should work.