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. PuTTYgen.exe is the graphical tool on Windows OS. While on the other side, Linux OS has the only command-line version could be accessible using SSH commands.
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To download PuTTYgen the primary requisite is to acquire the copy of PuTTY installation package. For the 64-bit operating system, one must install the 64-bit version of PuTTY, i.e. putty-64bit--installer.msi.Similarly, for the 32-bit operating system, the respective 32-bit version of PuTTY, i.e. putty--installer.msi needs to be installed.
To get PuTTY, go to PuTTY Installation Download page, whereby the complete installation package will be available with setup instructions, installation guide, and download links to all other components of PuTTY such as putty.exe, pscp.exe, psftp.exe, puttytel.exe, plink.exe, pageant.exe and putty.zip.
puttygen on Windows doesn't seem to accept any command line arguments that I can tell. That error is complaining about not being able to find the -P key I believe. If you run puttygen.exe key.ppk instead that should load the ppk into puttygen and allow you to give it a new passphrase and then re-save your key.
Run the puttygen.exe program.Click on the "Load" button.Select the private key file that you want to put a passphrase on.Enter the new desired passphrase in the "Key passphrase" and "Confirm Passphrase" fields.Click on the "Save private key" button. Overwrite the existing copy of your key.
I'm using PuttyGen to generate ssh keys for various windows computers. It requires a lot of manual user input, specifically in the form of swirling the mouse around in the window pane. I understand this to be necessary because Windows either doesn't have a random number generator like Linux's /dev/random or PuttyGen doesn't have access to it. But this got me to thinking: is swirling the mouse around in a little area sufficiently random to generate a good SSH-RSA key? Should I rather generate them on a Linux machine and port them over to the windows machines via flash drive or something (security issues with key movement notwithstanding)?
Another answer says that PuttyGen runs its mouse trace through a cryptographic key generator algorithm. We can expect that to make good use of the entropy in the trace. So it seems like a satisfactory approach.
[A] quick look at the Puttygen source code indicates that it seems to generates private keys solely based on mouse movements. It fills an array with the time of mouse movement events in the even cells and the mouse position in the odd cells, sprinkles some magic shuffling over it, and calls some RSA/DSA/EC* key generator with the array as argument.
The most common way to make a key on Windows is using Putty/Puttygen. Puttygen provides a neat utility to convert a linux private key to Putty format. However, what isn't addressed is that when you save the public key using puttygen it won't work on a linux server. Windows puts some data in different areas and adds line breaks.
The Solution: When you get to the public key screen in creating your key pair in puttygen, copy the public key and paste it into a text file with the extension .pub. You will save you sysadmin hours of frustration reading posts like this.
Alternatively if you want to grab the private and public keys from a PuTTY formated key file you can use puttygen on *nix systems. For most apt-based systems puttygen is part of the putty-tools package.
I recently had this problem as I was moving from Putty for Linux to Remmina for Linux. So I have a lot of PPK files for Putty in my .putty directory as I've been using it's for 8 years. For this I used a simple for command for bash shell to do all files:
I think what TCSgrad was trying to ask (a few years ago) was how to make Linux behave like his Windows machine does. That is, there is an agent (pageant) which holds a decrypted copy of a private key so that the passphrase only needs to be put in once. Then, the ssh client, putty, can log in to machines where his public key is listed as "authorized" without a password prompt.
Your local Windows desktop system is now installed with an SSH program (PuTTY), an X-windows server program(Xming) and public/private key icon (e.g. jdoe.ppk). You also have configured a remote host connection in a saved session (e.g. compute) with host name and login details (e.g. compute.example.edu and jdoe). To complete the process, you need to exchange keys to allow a trusted connection from your Windows desktop system to this saved session.
follow the prompts and type your responses as shown below. Otherwise, proceed to step 4. Prompt Action [jdoe@compute ]$ Type ssh-keygen -C "key comment"
e.g. key comment=jdoe compute Aug26 Enter file in which to save the key (/home/jdoe/.ssh/id_rsa): Press return to accept the default key file name shown in parentheses Enter passphrase: Press return Enter same passphrase again: Press return [jdoe@compute ]$ Type ssh-add -L >> .ssh/authorized_keys
When you no longer need Xming, right-click the Xming icon in the taskbar and click Exit. Then click Exit again in the Xming - Exit? window. This will close all X-windowsand running applications.
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