

So some utilities, such as the Pageant key list box and the Unix ssh-add utility, will list key fingerprints rather than the whole public key.īy default, PuTTYgen will display fingerprints in the SHA-256 format. The fingerprint value is intended to be cryptographically secure, in the sense that it is computationally infeasible for someone to invent a second key with the same fingerprint, or to find a key with a particular fingerprint.

This is derived cryptographically from the public key value, so it doesn’t need to be kept secret it is supposed to be more manageable for human beings than the public key itself. The Key fingerprint box shows you a fingerprint value for the generated key. When the key generation is complete, a new set of controls will appear in the window to indicate this. It will not move evenly, and may occasionally slow down to a stop this is unfortunately unavoidable, because key generation is a random process and it is impossible to reliably predict how long it will take. The progress bar will reset to the start, and gradually move up again to track the progress of the key generation. When the progress bar reaches the end, PuTTYgen will begin creating the key.
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You don’t need to wave the mouse in particularly imaginative patterns (although it can’t hurt) PuTTYgen will collect enough randomness just from the fine detail of exactly how far the mouse has moved each time Windows samples its position. Wave the mouse in circles over the blank area in the PuTTYgen window, and the progress bar will gradually fill up as PuTTYgen collects enough randomness. Once you have chosen the type of key you want, and the strength of the key, press the Generate button and PuTTYgen will begin the process of actually generating the key.įirst, a progress bar will appear and PuTTYgen will ask you to move the mouse around to generate randomness. You might choose to switch from probable to proven primes if you have a local security standard that demands it, or if you don’t trust the probabilistic argument for the safety of the usual method.

This takes more effort, but it eliminates that theoretical risk in the probabilistic method. The other methods cause PuTTYgen to use numbers that it is sure are prime, because it generates the output number together with a proof of its primality. So, in practice, nobody worries about it very much.
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There is in theory a possibility that it might accidentally generate a number that isn’t prime, but the software does enough checking to make that probability vanishingly small (less than 1 in 2^80, or 1 in 10^24). The probable primes method sounds unsafe, but it’s the most commonly used prime-generation strategy.
