When the progress bar reaches the end, PuTTYgen will begin creating the key. 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.
FILEZILLA PUBLIC KEY GENERATION SOFTWARE
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. Use proven primes with even distribution (slowest).If you don’t care about this, it’s entirely sensible to leave it on the default setting. The prime-generation method does not affect compatibility: a key generated with any of these methods will still work with all the same SSH servers. (The other key types don’t require generating prime numbers at all.)
On the Key menu, you can also optionally change the method for generating the prime numbers used in the generated key.