8.2.1 Generating a new key

This is a general outline of the procedure for generating a new key pair. The following sections describe the process in more detail.

• First, you need to select which type of key you want to generate, and also select the strength of the key. This is described in more detail in section 8.2.2 and section 8.2.3.
• Then press the ‘Generate’ button, to actually generate the key. Section 8.2.4 describes this step.
• Once you have generated the key, select a comment field (section 8.2.6) and a passphrase (section 8.2.7).
• Now you're ready to save the private key to disk; press the ‘Save private key’ button. (See section 8.2.8).

Your key pair is now ready for use. You may also want to copy the public key to your server, either by copying it out of the ‘Public key for pasting into authorized_keys file’ box (see section 8.2.10), or by using the ‘Save public key’ button (section 8.2.9). However, you don't need to do this immediately; if you want, you can load the private key back into PuTTYgen later (see section 8.2.11) and the public key will be available for copying and pasting again.

Section 8.3 describes the typical process of configuring PuTTY to attempt public-key authentication, and configuring your SSH server to accept it.