This is the same protocol that PuTTY's connection sharing has been
using for years, to communicate between the downstream and upstream
PuTTYs. I'm now promoting it to be a first-class member of the
protocols list: if you have a server for it, you can select it in the
GUI or on the command line, and write out a saved session that
specifies it.
This would be completely insecure if you used it as an ordinary
network protocol, of course. Not only is it non-cryptographic and wide
open to eavesdropping and hijacking, but it's not even _authenticated_
- it begins after the userauth phase of SSH. So there isn't even the
mild security theatre of entering an easy-to-eavesdrop password, as
there is with, say, Telnet.
However, that's not what I want to use it for. My aim is to use it for
various specialist and niche purposes, all of which involve speaking
it over an 8-bit-clean data channel that is already set up, secured
and authenticated by other methods. There are lots of examples of such
channels:
- a userv(1) invocation
- the console of a UML kernel
- the stdio channels into other kinds of container, such as Docker
- the 'adb shell' channel (although it seems quite hard to run a
custom binary at the far end of that)
- a pair of pipes between PuTTY and a Cygwin helper process
- and so on.
So this protocol is intended as a convenient way to get a client at
one end of any those to run a shell session at the other end. Unlike
other approaches, it will give you all the SSH-flavoured amenities
you're already used to, like forwarding your SSH agent into the
container, or forwarding selected network ports in or out of it, or
letting it open a window on your X server, or doing SCP/SFTP style
file transfer.
Of course another way to get all those amenities would be to run an
ordinary SSH server over the same channel - but this approach avoids
having to manage a phony password or authentication key, or taking up
your CPU time with pointless crypto.
Nearly every part of the code that ever handles a full backend
structure has historically done it using a pair of pointer variables,
one pointing at a constant struct full of function pointers, and the
other pointing to a 'void *' state object that's passed to each of
those.
While I'm modernising the rest of the code, this seems like a good
time to turn that into the same more or less type-safe and less
cumbersome system as I'm using for other parts of the code, such as
Socket, Plug, BinaryPacketProtocol and so forth: the Backend structure
contains a vtable pointer, and a system of macro wrappers handles
dispatching through that vtable.
Should be no significant change in behaviour.
(Well, entering usernames containing commas on Plink's command line will be
a little harder now.)
[originally from svn r7628]
particular, the config box uses it in place of the word `PuTTY',
which means mid-session reconfig in pterm will look less strange
once I implement it. Also, while I'm at it, I've personalised all
the dialog boxes and menu items and suchlike so that PuTTYtel
actually claims to be PuTTYtel rather than PuTTY.
[originally from svn r3074]
link-module const variable `be_default_protocol' which suggests a sensible
default to the front end (which can ignore it). (DEFAULT_PORT is replaced by a
lookup in the backend[] table.)
Still not pretty, but it does mean that the recent fix for `ssh-default'
doesn't break PuTTYtel.
[originally from svn r2613]
source files in which it's no longer required (it was previously
required in anything that included <putty.h>, but not any more).
Also moved a couple of stray bits of exposed WinSock back into
winnet.c (getservbyname from ssh.c and AF_INET from proxy.c).
[originally from svn r2160]
advantages:
- protocol modules can call sk_write() without having to worry
about writes blocking, because blocking writes are handled in the
abstraction layer and retried later.
- `Lost connection while sending' is a thing of the past.
- <winsock.h> is no longer needed in most modules, because
"putty.h" doesn't have to declare `SOCKET' variables any more,
only the abstracted `Socket' type.
- select()-equivalent between multiple sockets will now be handled
sensibly, which opens the way for things like SSH port
forwarding.
[originally from svn r744]
variant which is patent-safe in the US and legal in France and
Russia. This is a horrible hack in some ways: it's shown up serious
deficiencies in the module boundaries. Needs further work, probably
once the SSH implementations are recombined.
[originally from svn r410]
