PuTTY

From CryptoDox, The Online Encyclopedia on Cryptography and Information Security

Template:Infobox Software PuTTY is a free software SSH, Telnet, rlogin, and raw TCP client. It was originally available only for Windows, but is now also available on various Unix platforms, with work-in-progress ports to Classic Mac OS and Mac OS X. Other people have contributed unofficial ports to other platforms, such as Symbian powered mobile phones. It is beta software written and maintained primarily by Simon Tatham, and is open source, licensed under the MIT License.

Contents 1 Features 2 Version history 3 Applications 4 See also 5 External links

Features

Some features of PuTTY are:

• The storing of hosts and preferences for later use.
• Control over the SSH encryption key and protocol version.
• Command-line SCP and SFTP clients, called "pscp" and "psftp" respectively.
• Control over port forwarding with SSH, including built-in handling of X11 forwarding.
• Emulates most xterm, VT102 control sequences, as well as much of ECMA-48 terminal emulation.
• IPv6 support.
• Support 3DES, AES, Arcfour, Blowfish, DES.
• Public-key authentication support.
• Support for local serial port connections.

According to the official FAQ, the name "PuTTY" has no definite meaning:

"[PuTTY is] the name of a popular SSH and Telnet client. Any other meaning is in the eye of the beholder. It's been rumoured that ‘PuTTY’ is the antonym of ‘getty’, or that it's the stuff that makes your Windows useful, or that it's a kind of plutonium Teletype. We couldn't possibly comment on such allegations." [1]

Version history

Prior to 0.58, three consecutive releases (0.55–0.57) were made to fix significant security holes in previous versions, some allowing client compromise even before the server is authenticated.

0.58 contained several new features, including improved Unicode support, for international characters and right-to-left or bidirectional languages.

After almost a year since the previous release, the version 0.59 implements new features like the connection to serial ports, local proxying, sports SSH and SFTP speed improvements, changes the documentation format (for Vista compatibility) and has several bugfixes.

The 0.60 version implements three new features and some bugfixes.

Applications

Main functions are realized by PuTTY files themselves:

• PuTTY - the Telnet and SSH client itself
• PSCP - an SCP client, i.e. command-line secure file copy
• PSFTP - an SFTP client, i.e. general file transfer sessions much like FTP
• PuTTYtel - a Telnet-only client
• Plink - a command-line interface to the PuTTY back ends
• Pageant - an SSH authentication agent for PuTTY, PSCP and Plink
• PuTTYgen - an RSA and DSA key generation utility.
• pterm - a standalone terminal emulator

See also

Template:Portal

• Comparison of SSH clients
• Cygwin/X
• WinSCP
• Xming

External links

Template:Commons

• PuTTY official homepage