

A private key on your local computer isn’t as vulnerable as a password.

Something you have, on the other hand, is a lot more difficult to fake. In general, passwords are slowly being phased out for serious security applications – or at the very least, they’re being combined with other forms of authentication. And something you know can also be known by other people. Authentication usually hinges on one or more of three things:Ī password belongs to the first category – something you know. When logging in via SSH, you can choose to use a password or a key file. Step 2: Configuring Your Credentials with PuTTY.This tutorial will be done on a Linux VPS. You’ve converted it to the “PPK” format.If via the command line, you’ve put your private key into the “authorized_keys” file.

#HOW DO YOU CONFIGURE PUTTY FOR WINDOWS 10 HOW TO#
In this article, we’ll show you how to use a private key to allow you to log into a server without the need for typing in a password. We also saw that we need to use the “puttygen” tool to convert it into a format that’s accepted by a lot of software programs like WinSCP for SFTP access, and so on. In an earlier article, we saw how to generate a private/public key pair. However, private keys offer a good balance between convenience and security. While several methods exist to properly secure your server, from using a long password to two-factor authentication, they can be quite a hassle to set up and use on a day-to-day basis. With security becoming increasingly important in today’s modern world of information theft and privacy concerns, keeping your server safe and secure has almost become a necessity.
