Accessing your server using a key adds to your efforts of server security. With an SSH key, you are not required to SSH into your server, hence it offers an enhanced security for your servers. With this you can even change the default port to any of your choice and still access it normally.
Using the PuTTY SSH client, users can easily generate an SSH key on Windows machines.
You can generate an SSH key on Windows using the PuTTY SSH client. You can download PuTTY for free from any external site.
Inorder to generate a key using PuTTY, users must follow the below steps :
Step I – You must first download and start the puttygen.exe generator.
Step II – You must now select SSH2 DSA and hit the Generate option. You can find the SSH2 DSA option in the section named “Parameters“.
Sep 26, 2019 PuTTY. PuTTY is an SSH client for Windows. You can use PuTTY to generate SSH keys. PuTTY is a free open-source terminal emulator that functions much like the Terminal application in macOS in a Windows environment. This section shows you how to manually generate and upload an SSH key when working with PuTTY in the Windows environment. Jan 12, 2015 This tutorial shows you how to quickly and easily create a pair of SSH Keys using PuTTYgen, one tool in the open source PuTTY suite. Install putty and generate ssh key to auto log in to.
Oct 17, 2019 Though there are varying methods of generating SSH keys on machines using Windows, this one uses PuTTY Key Generator. 1: Generate the key. ATTENTION: The procedure and screen captures in this section reflect the latest version of PuTTY as of July 21, 2017 (0.70). If you use a different version, your interface may differ from the one pictured.
Step III – You can opt for moving the mouse pointer in random within the small screen and generate the key pairs.
Step IV – For identifying the key, you would be prompted to enter a key comment. This is usually helpful when you have multiple SSH keys active on a server.
Step V – You are required to enter the passphrase and confirm it. This passphrase would hereafter take care of protecting your key. Whenever you get connected via. SSH, you will require this unique key.
Step VI – Hit the “Save private key” for saving your private key.
Step VII – Then, hit the “Save public key“. This would save your public key.
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How to generate an SSH key on Windows using PuTTY ?
Accessing your server using a key adds to your efforts of server security. With an SSH key, you are not required to SSH into your server, hence it offers an enhaced security for your servers. With this you can even change the default port to any of your choice and still access it normally.
Using the PuTTY SSH client, users can easily generate an SSH key on Windows machines.
You can generate an SSH key on Windows using the PuTTY SSH client. You can download PuTTY for free from any external site.
Inorder to generate a key using PuTTY, users must follow the below steps :
Step I – You must first download and start the puttygen.exe generator.
Step II – You must now select SSH2 DSA and hit the Generate option. You can find the SSH2 DSA option in the section named “Parameters“.
Step III – You can opt for moving the mouse pointer in random within the small screen and generate the key pairs.
Step IV – For identifying the key, you would be prompted to enter a key comment. This is usually helpful when you have multiple SSH keys active on a server.
Step V – You are required to enter the passphrase and confirm it. This passphrase would hereafter take care of protecting your key. Whenever you get connected via. SSH, you will require this unique key.
Step VI – Hit the “Save private key” for saving your private key.
Step VII – Then, hit the “Save public key“. This would save your public key.
PuTTYgen is a key generator tool for creating pairs of public and private SSH keys. It is one of the components of the open-source networking client PuTTY. Although originally written for Microsoft Windows operating system, it is now officially available for multiple operating systems including macOS, Linux. PuTTYgen.exe is the graphical tool on Windows OS. While on the other side, Linux OS has the only command-line version could be accessible using SSH commands.
The key generation utility – PuTTYgen can create various public-key cryptosystems including Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA), Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA), Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), and Edwards-curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA) keys.
The aforementioned public-key cryptosystems principally focus on secure data transmission and digital signatures.
Although PuTTYgen collects keys in its native file format i.e. .ppk files, the keys can easily be converted to any file format. For Windows, the software interface is PuTTYgen.exe, whereas, for Linux OS the command-line adaptation is available using SSH commands.
PuTTYgen is used to generate public or private key pair for creating SSH keys. Below is the complete guidance about how to generate RSA key in the Windows operating system:
Various Ways to Use RSA Key Pair
RSA key pair generated through PuTTYgen is used in two various ways defined as below:
PuTTYgen being a component of the terminal emulator PuTTY does not have to be downloaded separately, hence, comes with the PuTTY .msi installation package. You can follow the simple steps to download PuTTYgen software for your system. That is the reason why you don’t need to download PuTTYgen separately. Once you download PuTTY software, you will be able to install and run PuTTYgen easily in no time. Below is the complete instruction about how to download and install PuTTY on Windows.
Apart from that, it is also integrated into third-party programs such as WinSCP installation package. Below you can find a complete PuTTYgen download and installation guide for all operating systems.
To download PuTTYgen the primary requisite is to acquire the copy of PuTTY installation package. For the 64-bit operating system, one must install the 64-bit version of PuTTY, i.e. putty-64bit-<version>-installer.msi.Similarly, for the 32-bit operating system, the respective 32-bit version of PuTTY, i.e. putty-<version>-installer.msi needs to be installed.
To get PuTTY, go to PuTTY Installation Download page, whereby the complete installation package will be available with setup instructions, installation guide, and download links to all other components of PuTTY such as putty.exe, pscp.exe, psftp.exe, puttytel.exe, plink.exe, pageant.exe and putty.zip.
Windows domain generate certificate ca and private key.
Following the successful download of the PuTTY installation package. It is time to install the program. Go to How to install PuTTY on Windows, whereby you will find the step by step guidance for PuTTY installation for Windows operating system.
After successfully downloading and installing PuTTY on your Windows machine, you are just 2-3 clicks away to run PuTTYgen. Follow the below-given step by step guidance to run PuTTYgen:
To run PuTTYgen, Go to Windows -> Start Menu -> All Programs -> PuTTY -> PuTTYgen. You will see a window for the PuTTY Key Generator on your screen.
Voila! Now you can generate public or private key pair using PuTTYgen.
Below is the detailed guide to download PuTTYgen on Mac operating system. Mac OS has a built-in command-line SSH client known as Terminal. To utilize it, go to Finder and then opt for Go -> utilities from the top menu. After that find the terminal which supports SSH connections to remote servers.
However, to run PuTTYgen for mac, the first one must have to install PuTTY. There are multiple ways to install PuTTY, which are Homebrew or MacPorts. Both alternatives will also install the command-line of adaptations of PuTTYgen.
Mac has the port of PuTTY which can be installed in various ways described as below:
sudo brew install putty
sudo port install putty
–cp /opt/local/bin/putty ~/Desktop/PuTTY
However, there is an alternative way to install PuTTY on Mac OS. Cyberduck is a widely used Mac OS SSH Client. Once PuTTY installed on the Mac OS, a user can convert PuTTY derived private key format to OpenSSH.
To convert the private key to standard PEM format, type the following command –
puttygen privatekey.ppk -O private-openssh -o privatekey.pem
You can also read the guide to convert .pem file to .ppk using puttygen.
To download PuTTYgen for Ubuntu (Linux) operating system, a user to first install PuTTY. However, in some Linux distributions, the SSH key generation tool – PuTTYgen needs to be installed independently from the PuTTY client.
For example, Debian Linux requires the below-given code to install PuTTYgen:
sudo apt install putty-tools
To create the key pair for authentication in Linux use the below command:-
puttygen -t rsa -b 2048 -C 'user@host' -o keyfile.ppk
Below are few important command line options in the Linux operating system for PuTTY:
PuTTYgen [-t keytype [-b bits] [-q] keyfile]
[-C new-comment] [-P]
[-O output-type -p -l -L]
[-o output-file]
Options:
Thus, above are the prominent commands of PuTTYgen in Linux operating system. Besides that, there are many other commands available to perform various tasks from the command prompt in Linux at flank speed.
It is important to know the types of key PuTTYgen supports prior to using it. Below are the key types that it currently supports for SSH-2 and SSH-1 protocol:-
The above description is a detailed brief on downloading and running PuTTYgen on all major operating systems. For further details please check the Download PuTTY page.