cygwin ssh no putty yes?

ssh cygwin putty passphrase
ralph picture ralph · Feb 22, 2009 · Viewed 13.3k times · Source

I generated a keys with putty w/ no passphrase. putty works fine, but now i installed cygwin and would like to use ssh to login. For some reason i'm prompted for a passphrase? why? putty just logs straight in? i don't want to have to generate a new key and annoy the network admins. here is what it looks like in cygwin: $ ssh -i Documents\ and\ Settings/xxxxx/My\ Documents/xxxxx\ putty\ keys/private\ key.ppk dev.xxxxxx.com Enter passphrase for key 'Documents and Settings/xxxxx/My Documents/xxxxx putty keys/private key.ppk': Permission denied (publickey).

Answer

Joonas Pulakka picture Joonas Pulakka · Feb 22, 2009

Putty uses its own .ppk format for keyfiles, and Cygwin's ssh probably can't read them correctly.

Solution: convert the .ppk file to OpenSSH key format with puttygen.exe.

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