{"id":29935,"date":"2019-06-10T13:25:45","date_gmt":"2019-06-10T18:25:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rosehosting.com\/blog\/?p=29935"},"modified":"2022-12-15T06:34:35","modified_gmt":"2022-12-15T12:34:35","slug":"how-to-use-a-private-key-and-putty-to-log-into-your-server-securely","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rosehosting.com\/blog\/how-to-use-a-private-key-and-putty-to-log-into-your-server-securely\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Use a Private Key and PuTTY to Log into Your Server Securely"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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.<\/p>\n

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In an earlier article, we saw how to generate a private\/public key pair<\/a><\/span>. 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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:<\/span><\/p>\n

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  1. Generated a private\/public key pair on your server<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. If via the command line, you’ve put your private key into the “authorized_keys” file<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. You’ve downloaded your private key<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. You’ve converted it to the “PPK” format<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This tutorial will be done on a Linux VPS<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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    Table of Contents<\/p>\n