Key Authentication for PuTTY and WinSCP

Dec 5, 2021 · 1 min read

windows ssh it security edb25519 putty winscp

In the video below, we show how to do key authentication for PuTTY and WinSCP

SSH keys are a more secure method of authentication than using a username and password and edb25519 is a more modern and less intensive algorithm then RSA

We show how to create public and private edb25519 keys using puttygen and how to authorize SSH keys to login to a Linux server running Ubuntu server 20.04 for example

We show how to configure PuTTY to use a private SSH key for authentication and how to disable password authentication on an Ubuntu server to enforce SSH key authentication

We also show how to import a private key made with OpenSSH and convert it to a PPK file using pttgen so that PuTTY can use it

This way you can use the same key on either operating system

We also show how to configure WinSCP to use a private SSH key for authentication

Useful links:
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html
https://winscp.net/eng/download.php