How to restore SSH keys on Windows 11

Published on July 12, 2024

ssh Windows 11

I'm writing this as a note to future self. I find myself using a Windows 11 laptop as my daily driver and I'd like to write some blog posts. I use Eleventy for my blog and Capsul to host it as a VPS. I need to be able to SSH to the VPS, which means I need to restore my SSH keys from one of my Linux workstations. Here are the steps I researched and followed to get up and running.

• Locate backup of SSH keys.

  • id_ed25519 (Important: This is the private key so should be considered confidential and secure.)
  • id_ed25519.pub

• The computer I'm using already had %userprofile%\.ssh directory but if it's not there, create it.

• Copy the SSH key files to %userprofile%\.ssh.

• Execute the following PowerShell commands:

  Get-Service ssh-agent | Set-Service -StartupType Automatic
  Start-Service ssh-agent
  ssh-add c:\users\obsolete29\.ssh\id_ed25519

• That gave me the following error message:

  @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
  @         WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE!          @
  @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
  Permissions for 'C:\\users\\michael' are too open.
  It is required that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
  This private key will be ignored.
  harley\.ssh\id_ed25519: No such file or directory

• I used File Explorer to remove the permissions on the .ssh folder so that only I had access to it. I then re-ran the ssh-add command and it worked.

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