8.2.9 Saving your public key to a disk file

RFC 4716 specifies a standard format for storing SSH-2 public keys on disk. Some SSH servers (such as ssh.com's) require a public key in this format in order to accept authentication with the corresponding private key. (Others, such as OpenSSH, use a different format; see section 8.2.10.)

To save your public key in the SSH-2 standard format, press the ‘Save public key’ button in PuTTYgen. PuTTYgen will put up a dialog box asking you where to save the file. Select a directory, type in a file name, and press ‘Save’.

You will then probably want to copy the public key file to your SSH server machine. See section 8.3 for general instructions on configuring public-key authentication once you have generated a key.

If you use this option with an SSH-1 key, the file PuTTYgen saves will contain exactly the same text that appears in the ‘Public key for pasting’ box. This is the only existing standard for SSH-1 public keys.