How to use SSH Public/Private keys in PuTTY

Three different factors to prove your identity can be used: Something you know, something you have and something you are. To make the authentication procedure more reliable, you should always try to use at least two of these three factors. When using public/private keys for authentication, and protecting the private key with a passphrase, you can combine two authentication factors and thus make the authentication procedure more reliable and hence, your server more secure.

When using SSH public/private key authentication, a user needs to generate a public/private key pair on his workstation.

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After generating them, the user must copy the public key to a file with the name authorized_keys. This file is typically in the users home directory on the server, placed in a hidden subdirectory that has the name .ssh. In this procedure you'll learn how to generate a public/private key pair on a Windows workstation where PuTTY is used.

In this article you have read how to use public/private keys to establish a better secured session between a Windows client and a Linux server. Use it if possible, because using keys is so much more secure than using passwords when establishing a remote session using an untrusted network such as the Internet.

About the author: Sander van Vugt is an author and independent technical trainer, specializing in Linux since 1994. Vugt is also a technical consultant for high-availability (HA) clustering and performance optimization, as well as an expert on SLED 10 administration.

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