Starting from Windows 10 build 1809, Windows has a native SSH client that is based on the OpenSSH port.
The OpenSSH client in Windows includes an ssh-keygen – the command-line tool for creating authentication keys for SSH.
To create a pair of SSH keys in Windows, the ssh-keygen command can be executed from a Windows command-line prompt (CMD) or PowerShell.
This note shows how to generate SSH keys in Windows using the ssh-keygen command.
Cool Tip: How to fix “Bad owner or permissions on .ssh/config”. Read More →
Generate SSH Key in Windows
Before generating the SSH keys in Windows using the ssh-keygen command it is required to ensure that the “OpenSSH Client” feature in enabled.
For this, open the “Optional features” by pressing ⊞ Win + R to start the “Run” dialog, type in the ms-settings:optionalfeatures command and click “OK”:
If the “OpenSSH Client” is not present in the list, click on the “Add a feature” to find and install it:
Run the ssh-keygen command from the Windows command-line prompt (CMD) or PowerShell to generate the SSH keys:
C:\> ssh-keygen
- sample output -
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (C:\Users\<UserName>/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in C:\Users\<UserName>/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in C:\Users\<UserName>/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
SHA256:QuaxSRSTbyN3pXlacwQTcE0miET5yvAT5EucH8UYD8Y <UserName>@<HostName>
The key's randomart image is:
+---[RSA 3072]----+
| +=o+=**=o |
| ...+.E+++o |
| == o =.. |
| =o+@ * + . |
| =OSB = o |
| .* o |
| . |
| |
| |
+----[SHA256]-----+
By default, without any arguments, this command creates a key pair of a private key – id_rsa and a public key – id_rsa.pub and saves them into the folder C:\Users\<UserName>\.ssh.
If you want to choose an algorithm and key size, while generating the SSH keys, you can do this as follows:
C:\> ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 C:\> ssh-keygen -t dsa C:\> ssh-keygen -t ecdsa -b 521 C:\> ssh-keygen -t ed25519