18.9 Generating a Private Key with PuTTYgen

The previous section explored the use of existing private and public keys when working with PuTTY. If keys do not already exist, they can be created using the PuTTYgen tool which is included with the main PuTTY installation.

To create new keys, launch PuttyGen and click on the Generate button highlighted in Figure 18-4:

Figure 18-4

Move the mouse pointer around to generate random data as instructed, then enter an optional passphrase with which to encrypt the private key. Once the keys have been generated, save the files to suitable locations using the Save public key and Save private key buttons. The private key can be used with PuTTY as outlined in the previous section. To install the public key on the remote server use the steps covered in the earlier section on using SSH within PowerShell on Windows 10.