PuTTY

PuTTY is a free and open source terminal emulator application which can act as a client for the SSH, Telnet, rlogin, and raw TCP computing protocols and as a serial console client. The name "PuTTY" has no definitive meaning,^[1] though "tty" is the name for a terminal in the Unix tradition, usually held to be short for Teletype.

PuTTY was originally written for Microsoft Windows, but it has been ported to various other operating systems. Official ports are available for some Unix-like platforms, with work-in-progress ports to Classic Mac OS and Mac OS X, and unofficial ports have been contributed to platforms such as Symbian^[2][3] and Windows Mobile.

PuTTY was written and is maintained primarily by Simon Tatham and is currently beta software.

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 (local, remote or dynamic port forwarding), including built-in handling of X11 forwarding.
• Emulates most xterm, VT102 control sequences, as well as much of ECMA-48 terminal emulation.
• IPv6 support.
• Supports 3DES, AES, Arcfour, Blowfish, DES.
• Public-key authentication support.
• Support for local serial port connections.
• Self-contained executable requires no installation.
• Supports the zlib@openssh.com delayed compression scheme (As of r9120 2011-03-05).

Version history

PuTTY's development dates back to early 1999,^[4] and it has been a usable SSH-2 client since October 2000.^[5][6]

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.

Version 0.58, released in April 2005, contained several new features, including improved Unicode support, for international characters and right-to-left or bidirectional languages.

Version 0.59, released in January 2007, implemented new features such as connection to serial ports, local proxying, support for SSH and SFTP speed improvements, changes to the documentation format (for Vista compatibility), and has several bugfixes.

Version 0.60, released in April 2007, implements three new features and some bugfixes.

Snapshot r9120 2011-03-05 added support for the zlib@openssh.com delayed compression scheme.

Version 0.61 Beta, released in July 2011, implements new features, bug fixes, and compatibility updates for Windows 7 and various SSH server software.

Version 0.62, released in December 2011, contains some bug fixes, including one security vulnerability^[7].

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

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

References

External links

• Project home page
• PuTTY at Ohloh

• Development libraries related to PuTTY
  • W-PuTTY-CD, PuTTY Communications in a Microsoft Windows DLL