[paramiko] how to verify a public key?

[larry price]

Hi, I've googled the archives and looked through the documentation
trying to answer this question.

I want to take a string of text and determine if it is or is not a
valid (well-formed) dsa or rsa public key and then hash it for
comparison.

I also want to be able to do elementary repair (stripping whitespace
and illegal chars out of the text blob) to deal with broken email
clients or cut and paste strangeness.

I looked through pycrypto too, and although that seemed more promising
it deals with the generation but not the verification step.

I assume that somewhere in the server components you do something that
looks like parsing an authorized_keys file. Where is that spot?

I see that check_auth_publickey is a placeholder,

is there somewhere else I should be looking?