Generate Ssh Keys With Putty Or Ssh-keygen

Posted on 16.04.2020 by admin

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Generate Ssh Keys With Putty Or Ssh-keygen Download
Generate Ssh Keys With Putty Or Ssh-keygen Windows

OpenSSH is the de facto standard implementation of the SSH protocol. If PuTTY and OpenSSH differ, PuTTY is the one that's incompatible. If you generate a key with OpenSSH using ssh-keygen with the default options, it will work with virtually every server out there.
Jul 19, 2013 Generating OpenSSH-compatible Keys for Use with PuTTY. To generate a set of RSA keys with PuTTYgen: Start the PuTTYgen utility, by double-clicking on its.exe file; For Type of key to generate, select RSA.

3min Read

SSH keys are one of the most secure SSH authentication options. It is definitely more secure than the usual SSH password authentication. Therefore, it is highly recommended to use SSH Key authentication method for connections to your servers.

With password authentication, you can connect to your server from any location, you only need to fill in your password. However, if your password gets leaked, it is a major risk as anyone who knows your password will be able to get into the server.

SSH Key authentication only allows connections from clients whose key matches the one on the server. Basically, you generate a key pair (private key and public key). The private key is placed on your local machine and the public key is uploaded to the server. Openssl generate a certificate from a key pair 1. When connecting to the server, a validation of these two keys is made and if the key pair passes the validation you are allowed to connect. Of course, you can upload keys of multiple users so that you or other authorized users would be able to connect to the server from different computers.

As you can see this is a much safer connection method. In this tutorial, we will focus on Windows users who use PuTTY for connections to the server and show how to generate PuTTYSSH Keys. If you want to generate SSH Keys on Linux or Mac, see this tutorial.

What you’ll need

Before you begin this guide you’ll need the following:

Access to your Linux server / VPS
PuTTY and PuTTYgen installed on your computer (Download here)

Step 1 — Downloading PuTTYgen

Most of you have PuTTY installed on your computers already, however, to generate SSH Keys you also will need PuTTYgen.

Download PuTTYgenhere
You should be able to see this file downloaded:

No installation is required for PuTTYgen, it will run when you execute the file.

Step 2 — Generating your SSH Key pair

Open up PuTTYgen by double clicking on the puttygen.exe file you have downloaded in Step 1.
You should be able to see a window like this:
Before generating your SSH Key pair, you can edit some settings, for example, key length, however, in most cases the default options will work just fine.
Generate your SSH Key pair by clicking the Generate button.
When the progress bar starts loading, move your mouse randomly across the area to load up the bar and generate your key pair.
Your public SSH key will be displayed on the screen:
For additional security it is highly recommended to think of a passphrase for your SSH key (However, you can also leave it empty):
Save your private key to any desired location on your computer and name it anything you like.
Save your public key to the same location on your computer and name it anything you like.

And that is it, you have generated your SSH Key pair. The private key will stay on your computer (do not provide it to anyone) while your public key needs to be uploaded to the server you wish to connect to.

Step 3 — Setting up your private key on PuTTY

In order for the server to recognize your computer when connecting from PuTTY, you need to attach the private key to PuTTY.

Open up PuTTY.
Navigate to Connection -> SSH -> Auth in the left sidebar.
Browse for your private key file in the field Private key for authentication
Select the private key file with .ppk ending and click Open.

Step 4 – Adding public key to server

Lastly, you need to upload your public key to the server:

On your local computer, open public key file (id_rsa.pub) you generated in Step 2 with any text editor and copy its contents (public key).
Connect to your VPS using Putty. See this guide for detailed steps.
If .ssh folder does not exist, create it together with authorized_keys file with the following command:
mkdir ~/.ssh touch ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
Secure SSH Key file by changing permissions:
chmod 0700 ~/.ssh; chmod 0644 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
Open authorized_keys file with vim text editor:
vim ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
Press i key on your keyboard and right mouse button to paste the public key.
Press Esc button and type in :x, hit Enter button. This command will save changes made to the file.

That is it, you can now use SSH keys instead of SSH password authentication to connect to your VPS.

Conclusion

You have learned how to generate PuTTY SSH Keys using PuTTYgen. This will make your connection to the server a lot more secure and convenient as you will not need to fill in the password each time. We recommend using this way of SSH authentication at all times and disable password authentication for good to completely secure your server. To find out how to completely disable SSH Password authentication on your server and use SSH Key authentication instead, follow this tutorial: How to disable SSH Password authentication on VPS.

Generate Ssh Keys With Putty Or Ssh-keygen Download

To generate SSH public and private key pairs on Windows, one of the easiest tools to use, is the PuTTY Key Generator “puttygen.exe” (which can be downloaded from here).
The resulting generated files from the PuTTY Key Generator can be used to set up public key authentication with a remote server, allowing for more secure authentication over normal password based authentication (requires disabling password based authentication).
Download the PuTTY Key Generator
You can download puttygen from the following url:
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html
Run puttygen.exe
When puttygen has loaded you will be presented with a screen such as this:
Generate the public and private keys
Click the “Generate” button on the main window to start the process of generating the key data.
While this is happening, you will need to move your mouse around in the blank area at the top of the application. This is used to help randomize the data used to generate the keys.
Once the progress bar has gone through, the public and private key data will have been generated, and you are ready to save the keys.
Saving the public and private keys
Public Key:
Simply press the “Save public key” button. This will be used on the remote host you want to be able to connect into remotely, using the private key.
Private Key:
You have the option to enter a passphrase if you want to make the key more secure. Enter that in, and the confirmed passphrase.
After thats done (or if you dont want to use a passphrase), simply press the “Save private key” button. Store this key in a safe place.
Using the private key in PuTTY
For information on how to use the private key file in PuTTY, please check the following page:
Using SSH Private Key Files with PuTTY

Be sure to choose a name that is easy to remember.Amazon EC2associates the public key with the name that you specify as the key name.Amazon EC2 stores the public key only, and you store the private key. Anyone who possessesyourprivate key can decrypt your login information, so it's important that you store yourprivatekeys in a secure place.The keys that Amazon EC2 uses are 2048-bit SSH-2 RSA keys. Formore information, see.Each key pair requires a name. Ubuntu ssh generate key pair.

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