SSH with PuTTY to Cisco IP Phone

PuTTY freeware Windows client

To generate a public/private key pair:

• Download and then Launch puttygen.exe
• It should default to SSH-2 RSA, 1024 bits, which will work.
• Click “Generate”
• Move the mouse around in the blank area to generate “randomness” as instructed. Edit the “Key comment”, to work with the IP Phone SSH key with the value “default@cisco”
• Optionally, add a “Key passphrase” and “Confirm passphrase”, i.e. cisco123 Click “Save private key” and provide a filename for this key. It will later be referenced by PuTTY.
• Create a text file called authorized_keys and open it in notepad. Copy the entire text from the section titled “Public key for pasting into OpenSSH? authorized_keys file” and paste it into the file just created and opened in notepad and then save it. Now copy that file on to the TFTP server.

Now this key should be active and ready for use. To open an SSH session to the phone using this key with PuTTY

Launch PuTTY

• In the Connection -> SSH -> Auth section, click “Browse”, find the private key file you previously saved and choose it.
• In the Connection -> Data section, enter ‘default’ for the “Auto-login username:”
• In the Session section, enter the IP address of the phone To save these parameters for re-use, enter a Name for this profile in the “Saved Sessions” box and click the “Save” button.
• Click “Open” at the bottom of the PuTTY? window.
• After 10-15 secs, you should get a passphrase prompt (if you entered one for the key). Enter it (i.e. cisco123) If all is successful, you should get a login: prompt.
• At this point, you can now login to the phone with UN/PW default/user.
• You should then get a % prompt.

Courtesy of Ryan, Cisco TAC

Note that from a GNU/Linux machine you can run a command resembling ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 1024 and then copy the resulting ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub file to the tftp server as a file named authorized_keys

You then continue from that account with “ssh [email protected]” and fill out the textual login with a UN/PW such as default/user