What is puttygen

There is no need for a separate PuTTYgen download. Download the PuTTY installation package. For detailed installation instructions, see PuTTY installation instructions. Then click Generate , and start moving the mouse within the Window. Putty uses mouse movements to collect randomness.

The exact way you are going to move your mouse cannot be predicted by an external attacker. You may need to move the mouse for some time, depending on the size of your key. As you move it, the green progress bar should advance. Once the progress bar becomes full, the actual key generation computation takes place. This may take from several seconds to several minutes.

When complete, the public key should appear in the Window. You can now specify a passphrase for the key. You should save at least the private key by clicking Save private key. A fresh installed, disconnected Windows machine is secure enough. In a search for evidence to support or refute the unpredictability of mouse movements, I found nothing. Nobody seems to have conducted any research on the topic.

For now, I would advise to use methods of which we are quite confident to be secure. An individual program has much less opportunity to generate proper randomness, so software should use the system's source of randomness.

Software like ssh-keygen does this. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Is PuttyGen secure? Ask Question. Asked 2 years, 8 months ago. Active 2 years, 8 months ago. Viewed 1k times. Improve this question. Windows does have a good RNG, Puttygen just isn't using it.

Swashbuckler: Windows have a closed source RNG. For some that automatically disqualifies it from being a good RNG. If similar thing happens in propriety software, it'll likely just never be discovered at all.

Open source is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for really secure system. That was the first thing I wanted to do.

LieRyan: if openssl had been delivered closed the Debian packager would never have seen the compiler diagnostic that led them to cause the bug, plus would have not been able to create the bug.

I call that 'because'. Of course Debian by policy wouldn't have used something closed in the first place. Following the successful download of the PuTTY installation package. It is time to install the program. Follow the below-given step by step guidance to run PuTTYgen:. After that find the terminal which supports SSH connections to remote servers. Both alternatives will also install the command-line of adaptations of PuTTYgen. You can also read the guide to convert.

Besides that, there are many other commands available to perform various tasks from the command prompt in Linux at flank speed.