putty pageant protocol?

Question

ssh-agent has a protocol whereby data can be sent to it to get signed by a particular private key:

http://api.libssh.org/rfc/PROTOCOL.agent

In Linux, with ssh-agent, you'd open a Unix domain socket to SSH_AUTH_SOCK and send the packets to that. Windows, however, doesn't have a Unix domain socket.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

score 9 · Answer 1 · edited May 05 '16 at 15:02

9

The communication between putty and pageant has been done on the shared memory by using WIN32 APIs. I had implemented that protocol in Java with JNA. If you are interested in its protocol and want to learn how it runs on Windows, the following file may be useful,

https://github.com/ymnk/jsch-agent-proxy/blob/master/jsch-agent-proxy-pageant/src/main/java/com/jcraft/jsch/agentproxy/connector/PageantConnector.java

edited May 05 '16 at 15:02

Kristopher Johnson

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answered Sep 19 '12 at 05:12

ymnk

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URL works for me. I've just reformatted it as a real link, so maybe it will be easier to follow now. – Kristopher Johnson May 05 '16 at 15:03

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 23 '12 at 17:54

If you're implementing the protocol in C, you might reference the canonical PuTTY implementation. If you're implementing it in Python, the paramiko project implements the Putty Pageant protocol.

Best I understand, the protocol is the same, but the transport is different, using shared memory rather than sockets.

putty pageant protocol?

2 Answers2