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Under Windows, SSH key pairs can be generated with the tool PuTTYgen (in the section "alternative binaries) which is part of the PuTTY installation package and also available separately.
- Select: Type of key to generate: SSH-2 RSA
- Fill in: Number of bits in a generated key: 4096
- Press: Generate
- Fill in: your key passphrase
- Fill in: confirm your passphrase
- Press: Save private key
- Press: Save public key
- Please remember the path name where you saved your SSH key files!
- PuTTY and related tools use a special key file format. If you also want to use the same private key just generated above for connecting with ssh (OpenSSH), rsync, or scp (as available in Cygwin
, for example), you need to convert and to save the private key again under a different name or location ("Conversions" (main menu) → "Export OpenSSH key" ... "Save").
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Now the ssh command will automatically choose the proper credentials in the future, i. e., -l your_username and -i <private_key> can be omitted from the command line, so that ssh blogin is sufficient.
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PuTTY
In PuTTY, you have to add/select your private key to Connection → SSH → Auth to be able to log in.
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