All,
I'm quite adept at key generation and public/private key authentication on Linux, but am basically a fish out of water on windows. I have Win10 with Ubuntu bash installed and I've had no problem with the ssh-keygen
from within bash and setting up outbound passwordless ssh access to all Linux hosts. That is not what this questions asks.
This is about generating keys natively within Win10 OS so that I can ssh into Win10 w/o a password. (not the WSL bash instance, Win10 itself) For example, I can sit on my arch host and ssh into Win10 as follows:
Arch Host valhalla to Win10 host elite (HP elite workstation):
20:04 valhalla:~> uname -a
Linux valhalla 4.8.3-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Oct 20 19:53:59 CEST 2016 x86_64 GNU/Linux
20:04 valhalla:~> ssh elite
david@elite's password:
Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.14393]
(c) 2016 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Users\david>dir /a
Volume in drive C is Windows
Volume Serial Number is EA64-6B82
Directory of C:\Users\david
10/23/2016 03:38 PM <DIR> .
10/23/2016 03:38 PM <DIR> ..
10/22/2016 05:40 AM <DIR> AppData
10/22/2016 05:40 AM <JUNCTION> Application Data [C:\Users\david\AppData\Roaming]
10/22/2016 07:35 AM <DIR> Contacts
10/22/2016 05:40 AM <JUNCTION> Cookies [C:\Users\david\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCookies]
10/22/2016 07:35 AM <DIR> Desktop
10/23/2016 04:17 PM <DIR> Documents
10/23/2016 02:53 AM <DIR> Downloads
10/22/2016 11:40 PM <DIR> Favorites
10/22/2016 07:35 AM <DIR> Links
10/22/2016 05:40 AM <JUNCTION> Local Settings [C:\Users\david\AppData\Local]
10/22/2016 07:35 AM <DIR> Music
10/22/2016 05:40 AM <JUNCTION> My Documents [C:\Users\david\Documents]
10/22/2016 05:40 AM <JUNCTION> NetHood [C:\Users\david\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Network Shortcuts]
10/23/2016 03:37 PM 1,572,864 NTUSER.DAT
10/22/2016 05:40 AM 163,840 ntuser.dat.LOG1
10/22/2016 05:40 AM 131,072 ntuser.dat.LOG2
10/23/2016 03:38 PM 1,048,576 NTUSER.DAT{de890eec-984b-11e6-b234-9452f8984253}.TxR.0.regtrans-ms
<snip>
C:\Users\david>exit
Connection to elite closed.
20:04 valhalla:~>
The question is "is there a way to generate ssh keys (ecdsa) on Win10 natively?" (e.g. id_ecdsa
and id_ecdsa.pub
) and "if so, where do you put them on windows"? (is there a user .ssh
directory, where they go?)
Worst case, "can I generate a key-pair on Linux and move the pair to Win10 and tell windows to use it?" (if so, same question "where would they go?")
(as a side note, it was just impressive as heck to be able to ssh into a windows OS, something I've taken for granted on Linux for 16 years, but was somewhat surprised when it worked into Win10 :)
valhalla
(arch) toelite
(win10), wouldn't you just usessh-keygen
on valhalla to generate a suitable key-pair, and then copy the public key toelite
? (In fact, this is what you label "worst case".) Granted, I don't know exactly where inelite
one would copyvalhalla
's public key, but my point is that, for this particular use case, all the key-generation would happen invalhalla
, not inelite
. Therefore, I don't understand why you'd want to generate a key-pair on win10 (elite
)? Am I missing something?.ssh
,authorized_keys
andknown_hosts
-- but trying to locate the equivalents on windoze -- I'm still trying:p