The text of the host key warnings was replicated in three places: the
Windows rc file, the GTK dialog setup function, and the console.c
shared between both platforms' CLI tools. Now it lives in just one
place, namely ssh/common.c where the rest of the centralised host-key
checking is done, so it'll be easier to adjust the wording in future.
This comes with some extra automation. Paragraph wrapping is no longer
done by hand in any version of these prompts. (Previously we let GTK
do the wrapping on GTK, but on Windows the resource file contained a
bunch of pre-wrapped LTEXT lines, and console.c had pre-wrapped
terminal messages.) And the dialog heights in Windows are determined
automatically based on the amount of stuff in the window.
The main idea of all this is that it'll be easier to set up more
elaborate kinds of host key prompt that deal with certificates (if,
e.g., a server sends us a certified host key which we don't trust the
CA for). But there are side benefits of this refactoring too: each
tool now reliably inserts its own appname in the prompts, and also, on
Windows the entire prompt text is copy-pastable.
Details of implementation: there's a new type SeatDialogText which
holds a set of (type, string) pairs describing the contents of a
prompt. Type codes distinguish ordinary text paragraphs, paragraphs to
be displayed prominently (like key fingerprints), the extra-bold scary
title at the top of the 'host key changed' version of the dialog, and
the various information that lives in the subsidiary 'more info' box.
ssh/common.c constructs this, and passes it to the Seat to present the
actual prompt.
In order to deal with the different UI for answering the prompt, I've
added an extra Seat method 'prompt_descriptions' which returns some
snippets of text to interpolate into the messages. ssh/common.c calls
that while it's still constructing the text, and incorporates the
resulting snippets into the SeatDialogText.
For the moment, this refactoring only affects the host key prompts.
The warnings about outmoded crypto are still done the old-fashioned
way; they probably ought to be similarly refactored to use this new
SeatDialogText system, but it's not immediately critical for the
purpose I have right now.
Now we offer the OpenSSH certificate key types in our KEXINIT host key
algorithm list, so that if the server has a certificate, they can send
it to us.
There's a new storage.h abstraction for representing a list of trusted
host CAs, and which ones are trusted to certify hosts for what
domains. This is stored outside the normal saved session data, because
the whole point of host certificates is to avoid per-host faffing.
Configuring this set of trusted CAs is done via a new GUI dialog box,
separate from the main PuTTY config box (because it modifies a single
set of settings across all saved sessions), which you can launch by
clicking a button in the 'Host keys' pane. The GUI is pretty crude for
the moment, and very much at a 'just about usable' stage right now. It
will want some polishing.
If we have no CA configured that matches the hostname, we don't offer
to receive certified host keys in the first place. So for existing
users who haven't set any of this up yet, nothing will immediately
change.
Currently, if we do offer to receive certified host keys and the
server presents one signed by a CA we don't trust, PuTTY will bomb out
unconditionally with an error, instead of offering a confirmation box.
That's an unfinished part which I plan to fix before this goes into a
release.
Now that it's possible for a single invocation of PuTTY to connect to
multiple SSH servers (jump host followed by ultimate destination
host), it's rather unhelpful for host key prompts to just say "the
server". To check an unknown host key, users will need to know _which_
host it's purporting to be the key for.
Another possibility is to put a message in the terminal window
indicating which server we're currently in the SSH setup phase for.
That will certainly be what we have to end up doing for userpass
prompts that appear _in_ the terminal window. But that by itself is
still unhelpful for host key prompts in a separate dialog, because the
user would have to check both windows to get all the information they
need. Easier if the host key dialog itself tells you everything you
need to know to answer the question: is _this_ key the one you expect
for _that_ host?
This gets rid of all those annoying 'win', 'ux' and 'gtk' prefixes
which made filenames annoying to type and to tab-complete. Also, as
with my other recent renaming sprees, I've taken the opportunity to
expand and clarify some of the names so that they're not such cryptic
abbreviations.
