You will be asked to move your mouse over the blank area of the Key section to generate some randomness. Optionally, you can change it to 4096.Ĭlick the “Generate” button to start the process of generating the new key pair. In the “Number of bits in a generated key” field leave the default value 2048, which is sufficient for most use cases. In the “Type of key to generate” block leave the default RSA. Launch PuTTYgen by double-clicking on its “.exe” file or by going to the Windows Start menu → PuTTY (64-bit) → PuTTYgen. To generate an SSH key pair on Windows using PuTTYgen, perform the following steps: The installation is simple, double-click on the installation package and follow the instructions. If you don’t have PuTTYgen installed, head over to the PuTTY download pageĪnd download the PuTTY installation package. PuTTYgen is available as a standalone executable file, and it is also a part of the PuTTY. PuTTYgen is an open-source utility that allows you to generate SSH keys for the most popular Windows SSH client PuTTY

We will also show you how to set up an SSH key-based authentication and connect to your remote Linux servers without entering a password. This tutorial explains how to generate SSH keys on Windows with PuTTYgen. Using SSH keys is more secure and convenient than traditional password authentication. The two most popular mechanisms are passwords based authentication and public key-based authentication. Secure Shell (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol used for a secure connection between a client and a server and supports various authentication mechanisms.

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