Changing the passphrase of a private key in Windows

Posted by janos on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by janos
Published on 2013-06-27T16:51:29Z Indexed on 2013/06/28 10:23 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 273

Filed under:

Windows

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ssh-keys

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putty

I have a private key in Windows, created by puttygen.exe. I used default options to save it, the tool automatically gave it a .ppk extension, and it looks like this:

PuTTY-User-Key-File-2: ssh-rsa
Encryption: none
Comment: rsa-key-20130627
Public-Lines: 4
AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABJQAAAIBnvvAhyMs4rdlQd4OdajDw4jIPi6vIjrWjt4l4
5C3wHOSxyQQdtSA8XT3K0rSBnNtZRJTb5mfix67qQe3pHCTMSNsYIaBi8xQJHZRa
RxdY+1VtGnSlEma8KO2We9eDNCGiwrRTUzqvTiGCnzU0pF1MXxu3ObISJcpqv+sQ
1GB0cw==
Private-Lines: 8
AAAA..........
Private-MAC: XXXXXXXXX

Now I need to change the passphrase, and reading from the docs it seemed simple enough:

puttygen.exe -P key.ppk

But this pops up a window with this error:

PuTTYgen Error: Couldn't load private key (unable to open file)

I also tried to change the passphrase using ssh-keygen that comes with Git Bash:

ssh-keygen.exe -p -f key.ppk

It asks for my old passphrase, but then it gives me the error Bad passphrase. Which is not true, because I can add the key in pageant.exe, and I am not mistyping the passphrase...

Anything else I can try to change or drop the passphrase?

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