After this, the raw contents of the public key will be displayed alongside its fingerprint and a timestamp comment. You will be asked to move the mouse and press keys to improve the random number generation at the heart of SSH security. To generate a key pair with the PuTTY key generator, simply run puttygen.exe and click the Generate button in the window that appears. If you don’t already have Ubuntu on WSL, take a look at our Install Ubuntu on WSL tutorial.

The puttygen.exe executable from PuTTY for Windows 7 or 8.1.

The OpenSSH client built into Windows 10.

RequirementsĪll you need is a PC running Windows and one of the following installed: Over the following few steps, we’ll guide you through the process of generating SSH keys using Ubuntu on WSL, OpenSSH, and PuTTY. But even without Ubuntu, SSH keys can also be generated with the free and open source OpenSSH client built into Windows 10 or with PuTTY for Windows 8.1 and earlier. Generating these keys from Linux is easy, and thanks to Ubuntu on WSL, you can follow the same process from Windows 10.

But its authentication mechanism, where a private local key is paired with a public remote key, is used to secure all kinds of online services, from GitHub and Launchpad to Linux running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. SSH, the secure shell, is often used to access remote Linux systems.

Install putty windows 10