If you didn't create a keypair, you probably do not have one.
SSH2 traffic is encrypted with a symmetric session key established using DH, ECDH algorithms or GSSAPI key exchange. Neither the host key nor the user key are used for encrypting data – their only purpose is authentication.
Now remember that SSH supports several authentication methods: in addition to publickey
, almost all servers accept the simple password
and/or keyboard-interactive
, in which no key generation or usage takes place – the password is simply sent to the remote server for verification.
In other words, "since I've already established ssh connections before, they must be somewhere" is incorrect – the user keypair is not necessary for establishing connections.
If you did create a keypair, it will likely be in ~/.ssh/id_*
– for example, id_rsa
for the default RSA keypair, id_ecdsa
for ECDSA, id_dsa
for DSA. Although these files contain both private and public parts of the keypair, the public part is usually automatically extracted into a separate id_*.pub
file for convenience (id_rsa.pub
for id_rsa
and so on).