Mask openssh key

Problem to solve

I’m encountering an issue while attempting to add a private key as a CI variable. The problem arises from the inability to mask this key due to specific characters present within it. The error message received states:

This value cannot be masked because it contains the following characters: , and whitespace characters.

The private key I aim to mask is as follows:

----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----
<KEY>
-----END OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----

It appears that the spaces within the key may be causing the issue.

Steps to reproduce

Attempt to add a CI/CD variable using the provided private key pattern.

I overcome this problem with encoding the key, base 32 or base 16 should work

it turns out you can add base64 variables and mask them! but you need to remove the linebreaks. Example:
openssl base64 -in <input_file> | tr -d ‘\n’