

The Secure Shell grants access to the remote user by matching the keys. SSH Key in Windows enables you to establish a secure connection between two computers. It’s common to have many keys with more descriptive filenames, for instance.To Create SSH Key in Windows, three different methods are available. By convention, the private key is usually called id_rsa and the public key id_rsa.pub, but this isn’t a requirement.

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 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.
