Putty Key Generator Portable Download

Sep 29, 2019 PuTTY Key Generator, also known by the PuTTYgen moniker, is a small yet efficient program that can generate RSA and DSA keys for use with the OpenSSH authorizedkeys file.It is a component of. PuTTY Portable can run from a cloud folder, external drive, or local folder without installing into Windows. It's even better with the PortableApps.com Platform for easy installs and automatic updates. 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. Pageant has started, PuTTY then starts. If pageant is already running, just start PuTTY. Puttygen.exe Putty gen generation and import/export. Its portable, so it isn't run through the default registry relocation process. App/putty/putty.exe Fake putty that runs Pageant, Putty or both. The real putty is renamed to App/putty/putty-real.exe App. 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.

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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.

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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

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.

PuTTYgen is a tool used for generating public and private SSH keys which are its fundamental function. Though it collects keys in its own file format i.e. .ppk files, keys can also be transformed to any other file format quickly. It is available for the various operating system, i.e. Windows, Linux, Mac, etc. PuTTYgen.exe is the graphical tool on Windows OS. While on the other side, Linux OS has the only command-line version.

Contents

  • 2 Download PuTTYgen
    • 2.1 Download PuTTYgen on Windows
    • 2.2 Download PuTTYgen for Mac
    • 2.3 Download PuTTYgen for Linux

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 Windows operating system:

  1. 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.
  2. You will see the PuTTY key generator dialog box on your screen
  3. You will find a “Generate” button in that dialog. Clicking on it will lead to generating the keys for you.
  4. Now you will need to add a unique key passphrase in the Key passphrase and Confirm passphrase field.
  5. Click on the “Save Public Key” and “Save Private Key” buttons to save your public and private keys.
  6. You will see the text starting with ssh-RSA in the Public key for pasting into OpenSSH authorized_keys file field which is located at the top of the window. Copy that entire text to your clipboard by pressing ctrl+c as you will require the key to paste on your clipboard in the public key tool of control panel or directly on the cloud server.

Various Ways to Use RSA Key Pair

RSA key pair generated through PuTTYgen is used in two various ways defined as below:

  1. To assign while creating a new cloud server
    You can choose the public key from the given list of keys at the time of creating cloud server. If you don’t find your key in that list, then first add and then assign it.
  2. Assign to an existing cloud server
    At the time of connecting to the cloud server, first of all, you need to tell PuTTY to use it for utilizing your newly created RSA key pair.

The installation of PuTTYgen is very simple as it is installed as a part of normal PuTTY .msi package installation. 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.

Download PuTTYgen on Windows

The very first requisite is to acquire the copy of PuTTY installation package. If your system is of 64-bit, then you should install a 64-bit version of PuTTY, i.e. putty-64bit-<version>-installer.msi. In case of a 32-bit operating system, you will need to install the 32-bit version of PuTTY, i.e. putty-<version>-installer.msi

Go to PuTTY Installation Download page, where you will find the download link of PuTTY installation package with the exhaustive details of its installation, setup instruction, verifying release signature, various alternatives, many more.

Once the PuTTY installation package is downloaded successfully, now it’s time to install it by starting the installer. Go to How to install PuTTY on Windows where you will find the step by step guidance for PuTTY installation for Windows operation 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:

Run PuTTYgen on Windows

1. Go to Windows -> Start Menu -> All Programs -> PuTTY -> PuTTYgen. You will see a window for PuTTY Key Generator on your screen.

That’s it. Now you can generate public or private key pair using PuTTYgen.

Download PuTTYgen for Mac

Generate crypto key cisco 3850. You can find the step by step guide to download PuTTYgen for Mac operating system. Command-line SSH client is a part of the Mac operating system. 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.

Ported PuTTY for Mac

Mac has the port of PuTTY which can be installed in various ways described as below:

  1. Installation using Homebrew:
    Use the below-given command to install PuTTY in case you have already installed “brew”command.sudo brew install putty
  2. Installation using MacPorts:
    PuTTY is easily available through MacPorts. First of all, install MacPorts and then apply the below-given command.

    sudo port install putty    Use the below-given command to add the shortcut on the desktop.cp /opt/local/bin/putty ~/Desktop/PuTTY
  3. Alternatives to PuTTY on Mac OSCyberduck, used by many people on Mac OS is the best SSH Client is the ultimate alternative to PuTTY on Mac OS.

Download PuTTYgen for Linux

In order to download PuTTYgen for Linux (Ubuntu) operating system, one required to install PuTTYgen separate from the PuTTY client in case of some Linux distributions.

For example, Debian Linux requires the below-given code to install PuTTYgen:

sudo aptitude install putty-tools

Generate Key Pair for Authentication in Linux

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Use the below command to create the key pair for authentication in Linux.

PuTTYgen -t RSA -b 2048 -C “user@host” -o keyfile.ppk

Various Command Line Options of PuTTY in Linux

Below is the list of important command line options for PuTTY in Linux operating system.

PuTTYgen [-t keytype [-b bits] [-q] keyfile]
[-C new-comment] [-P]
[-O output-type -p -l -L]
[-o output-file]

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Options:

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  1. Keyfile – It is the name of the existing key file to read at the time of changing the current key.
  2. -t keytype – This command specifies the type of the key to creating. Its acceptable values are RSA and dsa.rsa1.
  3. -b bits – This command specifies a total number of bit in a particular key. 1024 is the perfect size for DSA key, while 2048 or 4096 are the perfect size for RSA keys.
  4. -q – This command suppresses the message about progress at the time of key generation.
  5. -C new-comment – This command is used to specify the comment to describe the key. It can be used for new and/or existing key. Key operation is not affected by comment. However, it is used to recognize the key owner, it’s not reliable completely as any value can be applied to it.
  6. –P – This command is used to update the passphrase of a key. Passphrase helps to encrypt the private key. As passphrase can’t be add or update on command line, it prompts a new passphrase tool to alter it.
  7. –old-passphrase-file – The old password of the key remains in this file. This is used when the key is protected by a passphrase.
  8. –new-passphrase file – This file entails the new passphrase of the key. This command comes in the action either at the time of generating new key or while applying –P command to change the passphrase.
  9. -O output-type – This command defines what to give in output. By default, the private key is the output.

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Thus, above are the prominent commands of PuTTYgen in Linux operating system. There are many other commands also available to perform a various task from the command prompt in Linux at flank speed.