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. 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. However, private keys offer a good balance between convenience and security.
In an earlier article, we saw how to generate a private/public key pair. 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 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. This comes with several benefits. In order to set up logging in using a private key on your server, you will have to have done the following first in order for this to work:
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- Generated a private/public key pair on your server
- If via the command line, you’ve put your private key into the “authorized_keys” file
- You’ve downloaded your private key
- You’ve converted it to the “PPK” format
This page contains download links for the latest released version of PuTTY. Currently this is 0.74, released on 2020-06-27. When new releases come out, this page will update to contain the latest, so this is a good page to bookmark or link to. Developed by Google Secure Shell Developers, the Chrome Secure Shell is a good PuTTY for Mac alternative for anyone who works with the Google Chrome browser. It is an xterm-compatible terminal emulator and stand-alone ssh client for Chrome. The app uses Native-Client to connect directly to ssh servers without the need for external proxies. SuperPuTTY aims to enhance the capabilities of the PuTTY SSH and Telnet client by allowing you to launch it in multiple tabs. It offers you the possibility to easily manage multiple sessions of. Putty is one of the Best Terminal Emulators available today. It Supports different types of Network Protocols such as SSH, FTP, SCP, Telnet. It is used as SSH Client to connect to Your Linux server.
This tutorial will be done on a Linux VPS.
Why Not Use a Password Instead?
When logging in via SSH, you can choose to use a password or a key file. Authentication usually hinges on one or more of three things:
- Something you know
- Something you have
- Something you are
A password belongs to the first category – something you know. And something you know can also be known by other people. Something you know can also be guessed. 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.
Something you have, on the other hand, is a lot more difficult to fake. A private key on your local computer isn’t as vulnerable as a password. Passwords are also susceptible to “man-in-the-middle” attacks, where a hacker can intercept your password in plain text when you connect to the server and then use it whenever they want.
A private key connection, however, doesn’t allow man-in-the-middle attacks. Your private key is never sent over the public network. By working through a complex sequence of cryptographic algorithms, SSH key authentication is completely safe from snooping.
For these reasons, you want to use private key authentication whenever you can.
Step 1: Downloading PuTTY
A prerequisite to using private keys to log in would be that you need to convert the private key you downloaded from your server into a “PPK” file for use with 3rd party programs. One such program is called PuTTY, and it’s something of a standard connection tool in the server world. You can download it from here, and grab the version that suits you best, like this:
It’s a standalone program and doesn’t require any installation process. So once you download it, you can just run it and get started right away.
Step 2: Configuring Your Credentials with PuTTY
To set up PuTTY, run the executable file and after the interface opens, click the “Sessions” tab on the left (it should be selected by default). Now enter your hostname and the port number. Normally the port number for SSH is 2222, but our test server is set to use a custom port to make it difficult for attackers to randomly make attempts to log in. Just replace 7022 from the screenshot below with the port number used by your server:
If you’re hosting with a hosting provider that has a custom SSH port, make sure you check with them as to what their port is.
Step 3: Specify the Private Key
Now expand “SSH” on the left-hand side, and click “Auth”, as shown here:
Click “Browse” and navigate to the location of your private key. Select it (it should be in the .PPK format) and you’re done! Click “Open” and an SSH window should open up. Enter the username with which you generated your private key and if all goes well, it should log in like this:
And that’s it – you’ve successfully opened an SSH session with private key authentication using PuTTY.
Of course, you don’t have to create and set up your private and public key pair on your Ubuntu 16.04 VPS if you use one of our Linux VPS Hosting services, in which case you can simply ask our expert Linux admins to set up the SSH keys for you. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.
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Here is our current FAQ for “Putty for Mac” it should help answer the most common questions and support request.
(Q) What is Putty for Mac?
(A) Putty is one of the Best Terminal Emulators available today. It Supports different types of Network Protocols such as SSH, FTP, SCP, Telnet etc. In Windows it is used as SSH Client to connect to Your Linux server or for some other purpose But what will you do if you are on Mac? You might be thinking , Is there any Software like Putty for Mac Available? The answer is Yes! With the help of some other Software’s we can Use putty on Mac although Putty is used widely on Windows Platform. Official Versions of Putty are available on Unix like Platforms, and now it’s widely available for Mac systems running OSX 10.11 or higher. Please see the FAQ entry about running Putty on OSX 10.8, 10.9 and 10.10 below.
(Q) I get this error when installing ( Error : LaunchServices: Could not store lsd-identifiers file at /private/var/db/lsd/com.apple.lsdschemes.plist ) is this a Putty error / bug?
(A) No, it’s a Mac OS X bug 🙂 See : https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7270354?tstart=0
(Q) Can I install Putty on OSX 10.12 Sierra?
(A) YES! See : http://osxdaily.com/2016/09/27/allow-apps-from-anywhere-macos-gatekeeper/
(Q) How do I expand the Putty window it is very small by default?
(A) Unfortunately at this time, Putty for Mac does not support resizing an established connection.
What you can do is create another session for your application and set a custom Window size for it by changing the Columns and Rows and then save that for future usage of that application.
I know it is not optimal and hopefully we will be able to support resizing sometime in the future.
(Q) Can I install and run Putty on OSX 10.8.x 10.9.x and 10.10.x ?
(A) YES! please see this post about PuTTY running on OS X 10.10 and this post about PuTTY running on 10.13 High Sierra.
(Q) I cannot enter the “#” character, the key combination is Alt-3 on macOS Sierra.
(A) In Mac, Putty has additional options in Terminal Keyboard. Uncheck Option Key Acts as Meta. Then Alt-3 should work. See the below screen-shot…
Super Putty For Macbook
(Q) It is not possible to paste a target host address into a new connection.
(A) Use Command+V keyboard combination (the equivalent to CTRL+V) on macOS.
(Q) How do I copy and paste into the sessions window
(A) The menu paste shown below is only for terminal windows (screenshot below).
In this case you use the cmd+v and cmd+c buttons to paste and copy respectively.
Sample:
Do cmd+c (after highlighting the local text) Now in the saved sessions text box (cursor is now there), press cmd+v:
Or your can right click then select paste (because of underlying gtk quirks, you have to move your cursor out of the context menu then back in so that you can highlight the paste):
Putty For Mac Catalina
Remember – the upper menu paste is for terminal windows only.
(Q) It’s not obvious how to launch puttygen, pageant, plink etc.
(A) puttygen, pageant, plink etc are command line programs (this is the current putty limitation of mac). So to access these programs you have to call for example:
/Applications/Putty4Mac/PuTTY.app/Contents/MacOS/puttygen
You can also place the programs in your PATH variable so that you can just call them from the command line.
(Q) Where are the support forums?
(A) Coming Soon!
(Q) Can I get a free trail version?
(A) Sorry but we don’t have a trial version at this time, by our 10.0 release we plan to have a fully functional demo / trial version available.
(Q) Do you have any videos of Putty running on MacOS
(A) Yes, we posted two short videos of the Putty install and Putty running here.
Putty Alternative For Mac
(Q) What License is Putty released under?
(A) The Putty executable and source code are distributed under the MIT license, which is similar in effect to the BSD license. The OS X kernel (darwin) is also released under the BSD license.
(Q) Do you have volume or educational discounts?
(A) Yes, we currently have volume discounts available that max out at 50% off the normal retail price, see this post for more details.
(Q) Do you have a standalone pTerm release?
(A) Yes, after a few request we did a standalone pTerm release it can be found here.
Super Putty For Mac Shortcut
(Q) Where can I purchase Putty for Mac and how much does it cost?
(A) Putty for Mac cost only $19.95 and can be purchased here.