Generate Ssh Rsa Key With Putty

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  1. Create Rsa Ssh Key
  2. Generate Ssh Rsa Key With Putty Key
  3. Putty Setup Ssh Key
  4. Generate Ssh Private Key Putty
  5. Generate Ssh Rsa Key With Putty Free
  6. Generate Ssh Public Key With Putty
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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: Once you install the PuTTY on your machine, you can easily run PuTTYgen. For the same, go to Windows - Start Menu - All Programs - PuTTY - PuTTYgen. Generating an SSH key. To generate an SSH key with PuTTYgen, follow these steps: Open the PuTTYgen program. For Type of key to generate, select SSH-2 RSA. Click the Generate button. Move your mouse in the area below the progress bar. When the progress bar is full, PuTTYgen generates your key pair. Type a passphrase in the Key passphrase field. How to convert ppk to SSH key using PuTTY Key Generator You won't be able to directly use your PuTTY 's key in Linux 's OpenSSH because the keys are of different format. You'll need to first convert PuTTY 's key to OpenSSH 's key format by following these steps. How To Configure SSH Keys Authentication With PuTTY And Linux Server In 5 Quick Steps. This tutorial explains how you can replace password-based SSH authentication with key-based authentication which is more secure because only the people that own the key can log in.

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. 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.

  1. Download PuTTYgenhere
  2. 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

  1. Open up PuTTYgen by double clicking on the puttygen.exe file you have downloaded in Step 1.
  2. You should be able to see a window like this:
  3. 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.
  4. Generate your SSH Key pair by clicking the Generate button.
  5. When the progress bar starts loading, move your mouse randomly across the area to load up the bar and generate your key pair.
  6. Your public SSH key will be displayed on the screen:
  7. For additional security it is highly recommended to think of a passphrase for your SSH key (However, you can also leave it empty):
  8. Save your private key to any desired location on your computer and name it anything you like.
  9. 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.

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

Step 4 – Adding public key to server

Key

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

  1. 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).
  2. Connect to your VPS using Putty. See this guide for detailed steps.
  3. If .ssh folder does not exist, create it together with authorized_keys file with the following command:
    mkdir ~/.ssh touch ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
  4. Secure SSH Key file by changing permissions:
    chmod 0700 ~/.ssh; chmod 0644 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
  5. Open authorized_keys file with vim text editor:
    vim ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
  6. Press i key on your keyboard and right mouse button to paste the public key.
  7. 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.

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This article describes ways to generate and use secure shell (SSH) keys on a Windows computer to create and connect to a Linux virtual machine (VM) in Azure. To use SSH keys from a Linux or macOS client, see the quick or detailed guidance.

Overview of SSH and keys

SSH is an encrypted connection protocol that allows secure sign-ins over unsecured connections. SSH is the default connection protocol for Linux VMs hosted in Azure. Although SSH itself provides an encrypted connection, using passwords with SSH connections still leaves the VM vulnerable to brute-force attacks or guessing of passwords. A more secure and preferred method of connecting to a VM using SSH is by using a public-private key pair, also known as SSH keys.

  • The public key is placed on your Linux VM, or any other service that you wish to use with public-key cryptography.

  • The private key remains on your local system. Protect this private key. Do not share it.

When you use an SSH client to connect to your Linux VM (which has the public key), the remote VM tests the client to make sure it possesses the private key. If the client has the private key, it's granted access to the VM.

Key

With

Depending on your organization's security policies, you can reuse a single public-private key pair to access multiple Azure VMs and services. You do not need a separate pair of keys for each VM or service you wish to access.

Your public key can be shared with anyone, but only you (or your local security infrastructure) should possess your private key.

Create Rsa Ssh Key

Supported SSH key formats

Azure currently supports SSH protocol 2 (SSH-2) RSA public-private key pairs with a minimum length of 2048 bits. Other key formats such as ED25519 and ECDSA are not supported.

Windows packages and SSH clients

You connect to and manage Linux VMs in Azure using an SSH client. Computers running Linux or macOS usually have a suite of SSH commands to generate and manage SSH keys and to make SSH connections.

Windows computers do not always have comparable SSH commands installed. Recent versions of Windows 10 provide OpenSSH client commands to create and manage SSH keys and make SSH connections from a command prompt. Recent Windows 10 versions also include the Windows Subsystem for Linux to run and access utilities such as an SSH client natively within a Bash shell.

Other common Windows SSH clients you can install locally are included in the following packages:

You can also use the SSH utilities available in Bash in the Azure Cloud Shell.

  • Access Cloud Shell in your web browser at https://shell.azure.com or in the Azure portal.
  • Access Cloud Shell as a terminal from within Visual Studio Code by installing the Azure Account extension.

Create an SSH key pair

The following sections describe two options to create an SSH key pair on Windows. You can use a shell command (ssh-keygen) or a GUI tool (PuTTYgen). Also note, when using Powershell to create a key, upload the public key as ssh.com(SECSH) format. When using CLI, convert the key into OpenSSH format prior to uploading.

Create SSH keys with ssh-keygen

If you run a command shell on Windows that supports SSH client tools (or you use Azure Cloud Shell), create an SSH key pair using the ssh-keygen command. Type the following command, and answer the prompts. If an SSH key pair exists in the chosen location, those files are overwritten.

For more background and information, see the quick or detailed steps to create SSH keys using ssh-keygen.

Create SSH keys with PuTTYgen

If you prefer to use a GUI-based tool to create SSH keys, you can use the PuTTYgen key generator, included with the PuTTY download package.

Generate Ssh Rsa Key With Putty Key

To create an SSH RSA key pair with PuTTYgen:

  1. Start PuTTYgen.

  2. Click Generate. By default PuTTYgen generates a 2048-bit SSH-2 RSA key.

  3. Move the mouse around in the blank area to provide randomness for the key.

  4. After the public key is generated, optionally enter and confirm a passphrase. You will be prompted for the passphrase when you authenticate to the VM with your private SSH key. Without a passphrase, if someone obtains your private key, they can sign in to any VM or service that uses that key. We recommend you create a passphrase. However, if you forget the passphrase, there is no way to recover it.

  5. The public key is displayed at the top of the window. You can copy this entire public key and then paste it into the Azure portal or an Azure Resource Manager template when you create a Linux VM. You can also select Save public key to save a copy to your computer:

  6. Optionally, to save the private key in PuTTy private key format (.ppk file), select Save private key. You will need the .ppk file later to use PuTTY to make an SSH connection to the VM.

    If you want to save the private key in the OpenSSH format, the private key format used by many SSH clients, select Conversions > Export OpenSSH key.

Provide an SSH public key when deploying a VM

To create a Linux VM that uses SSH keys for authentication, provide your SSH public key when creating the VM using the Azure portal or other methods.

The following example shows how you would copy and paste this public key into the Azure portal when you create a Linux VM. The public key is typically then stored in the ~/.ssh/authorized_key directory on your new VM.

Connect to your VM

One way to make an SSH connection to your Linux VM from Windows is to use an SSH client. This is the preferred method if you have an SSH client installed on your Windows system, or if you use the SSH tools in Bash in Azure Cloud Shell. If you prefer a GUI-based tool, you can connect with PuTTY.

Use an SSH client

Putty Setup Ssh Key

With the public key deployed on your Azure VM, and the private key on your local system, SSH to your VM using the IP address or DNS name of your VM. Replace azureuser and myvm.westus.cloudapp.azure.com in the following command with the administrator user name and the fully qualified domain name (or IP address):

If you configured a passphrase when you created your key pair, enter the passphrase when prompted during the sign-in process.

If the VM is using the just-in-time access policy, you need to request access before you can connect to the VM. For more information about the just-in-time policy, see Manage virtual machine access using the just in time policy.

Generate Ssh Private Key Putty

Connect with PuTTY

If you installed the PuTTY download package and previously generated a PuTTY private key (.ppk) file, you can connect to a Linux VM with PuTTY.

Generate Ssh Rsa Key With Putty Free

  1. Start PuTTy.

  2. Fill in the host name or IP address of your VM from the Azure portal:

  3. Select the Connection > SSH > Auth category. Browse to and select your PuTTY private key (.ppk file):

  4. Click Open to connect to your VM.

Next steps

Generate Ssh Public Key With Putty

  • For detailed steps, options, and advanced examples of working with SSH keys, see Detailed steps to create SSH key pairs.

  • You can also use PowerShell in Azure Cloud Shell to generate SSH keys and make SSH connections to Linux VMs. See the PowerShell quickstart.

  • If you have difficulty using SSH to connect to your Linux VMs, see Troubleshoot SSH connections to an Azure Linux VM.