How To - Login using Curl for Windows using Host Keys Authentication with Titan SFTP

Question

How to connect Curl using Host Key authentication running in Windows

Pre-requisites

Curl for Windows, Titan SFTP, SSH Key pairs

Steps

Download and install Curl for Windows https://curl.se/windows/

Note: The Microsoft curl build omits several good features, that is why you need to download curl from their website.

• no Public Suffix List (PSL) support, making it impossible to prevent "super cookies"
• no support for HTTP/2 or HTTP/3
• no support for GOPHER(S), LDAP(S), RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, WS(S))
• no brotli or zstd compression

I. Download and extract Curl for Windows (in this example: I extracted this under the folder below)

    C:\curl\

II. Generating Keypair in Windows 

C:\Users\nelpa\.ssh>ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048
Generating public/private rsa key pair.

Enter file in which to save the key (C:\Users\nelpa/.ssh/id_rsa):

Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):

Enter same passphrase again:

Your identification has been saved in C:\Users\nelpa/.ssh/id_rsa

Your public key has been saved in C:\Users\nelpa/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

The key fingerprint is:

SHA256:/hYNT5KbfOFTZhivcImMx+RdjSoPtYu36kIwOhmnHxo nelpa@DESKTOP-3P8H2A0

The key's randomart image is:

+---[RSA 2048]----+

|               o |

|          . o o .|

|         * = O   |

|    . + . & X =  |

|     * oSo ^ B   |

|    E ... * @    |

|     = o.  + o   |

|    . . ... .    |

|         ++.     |

+----[SHA256]-----+

C:\Users\nelpa\.ssh>dir

Volume in drive C has no label.

Volume Serial Number is 0455-A7B4

Directory of C:\Users\nelpa\.ssh

04/10/2025  09:00 AM    <DIR>          .

04/10/2025  09:00 AM    <DIR>          ..

04/10/2025  09:00 AM             1,876 id_rsa

04/10/2025  09:00 AM               404 id_rsa.pub

04/10/2025  04:12 AM               398 known_hosts

04/10/2025  03:59 AM               792 known_hosts - Copy

              4 File(s)          3,470 bytes

              2 Dir(s)  54,705,213,440 bytes free

 

III. Upload the generated Public Keys in Titan

Go to Users -> (Select the user) -> User Services -> SSH/SFTP -> Manage Host Keys -> Import (See below) – Then Add

IV.  Make sure that the public key has been added in SSH Host Key Management. See sample below:

 

V. Assign the Host key to the user (see sample below). Then save.

VI. Once added, you can now login from Windows using Curl using the command below:

c:\curl\bin>curl -v -u npalad: --key c:\users\nelpa\.ssh\id_rsa --pubkey c:\users\nelpa\.ssh\id_rsa.pub sftp://192.168.100.109

SSH/SFTP Server configuration in TitanSFTP

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