Literally speaking, it's not true that PuTTY only connects to the
server you told it to. It typically has to connect to a DNS server
first to find out where that server _is_. (If you've provided a
hostname, and if that hostname isn't in /etc/hosts or equivalent.)
Of course, if you're concerned about people _in your organisation's
network_ finding out where you've been connecting to, you have bigger
problems, because whether you did a DNS lookup or not they can
certainly see your IP-layer headers. But that really is outside the
scope of this document. I only mention DNS out of pedantry, because
not doing so made "does not connect to any other site" technically
inaccurate. (Perhaps even: only inaccurate if the DNS lookup happens
over TCP :-)
Re-reading the wording, I think I was a bit cavalier about "if you
don't like the host key cache recording where you've been, check host
keys yourself." It should be more like "check host keys yourself,
SERIOUSLY, WE REALLY MEAN IT, DO NOT LEAVE THIS STEP OUT."
In the original HTML-only version of the privacy document, there were
two major sections at <h2> level, "stuff stored locally" and "stuff
sent over the network", each with subsections at <h3> level describing
individual aspects. But somehow when I translated it into Halibut to
put it into the manual, they all became \H and the nesting was lost.
Jacob reminds me that that's another piece of saved data, less obvious
than the ones I'd already documented.
I'd actually forgotten myself _exactly_ which actions cause data to be
added to the jump list. But it's easy to check. The only functions
exported from jump-list.c are add_session_to_jumplist(),
remove_session_from_jumplist() and clear_jumplist(); the only one of
those that _records_ information (rather than removing it) is
add_session_to_jumplist(); and that is called in exactly one place,
namely at the end of load_session() in settings.c.
During the 0.81 release process, I found out that the Windows Store
now requires applications to provide a privacy policy, so I had to
write one in order to get 0.81 into the Store.
This initially seemed like makework (especially having to do it in a
hurry as a prerequisite to get a really important security fix
distributed!). But after I started writing it, I found there was
actually quite a lot to say. It's easy to think "PuTTY doesn't phone
home to the developers, that's all, we're done". But of course it
_does_ store information on your machine (host key cache, saved
sessions, etc). And it does send information to servers on the
network (only the ones you ask it to, but even so). And it's not 100%
obvious in every case what is and isn't stored, and what a privacy-
conscious individual might be revealing about themself by doing this
or that thing.
So I think the web page I hastily put up at the time of the 0.81
release deserves to be promoted into part of the documentation. Here's
a (very lightly) copy-edited version in the form of a docs appendix.
(Once this is committed and built, I expect I'll turn the privacy web
page into a mirror of this docs appendix, in the same way as the
website FAQ and feedback pages.)
This is a small refinement of my own to Marco Ricci's new mode
introduced by the previous commit. If Pageant is being run by a parent
process intending to make requests to it, then it's probably put a
pipe on Pageant's stdout, and will be reading from that pipe to
retrieve the environment setup commands. So it needs to know when it's
read enough.
Closing stdout immediately makes this as easy as possible, freeing the
parent process of the need to count lines of output (and also know how
many lines to expect): it can simply read until there's no more data.
This also means there's no need to make stdout line-buffered, of
course – the fclose will flush it anyway.
This new mode makes it easy to run Pageant as a "supervised" instance,
e.g. as part of a test harness for other programs interacting with an
SSH agent, which is the original use case. Because Pageant is then
running as a child process of the supervisor, the operating system
notifies the supervisor of the child's aliveness without resorting to
PIDs or socket addresses, both of which may principally run stale and/or
get recycled.
I've had more than one conversation recently in which users have
mentioned finding this mode inconvenient. I don't know whether any of
them would want to turn it off completely, but it seems likely that
_somebody_ will, sooner or later. So here's an option to do that.
With Google Groups severing its connection to Usenet today[*], newsgroup
access will require what today are quite specialised tools; and even
before that (and before the recent spam floods, which will hopefully now
cease) they didn't seem super useful as a way of getting PuTTY support.
[*] https://support.google.com/groups/answer/11036538
I've just removed the whole section, since we couldn't think of an
obvious consensus replacement venue -- certainly not one where we hang
out ourselves. There's Stackmumble and places like that, but we didn't
think of anywhere concrete to point to.
This has led to some rather unsatisfactorily vague 'seek help from some
public forum' wording in places, which could perhaps use revision.
An irate user complained today that they wished we'd documented
firewalls as a possible cause of WSAECONNREFUSED, because it took them
ages to think of checking that. Fair enough.
Someone just asked us a question which suggests they might have thought
they need to supply both files in the 'Public-key authentication' box in
the config dialog, to use public-key authentication at all. I can see
why someone might think that, anyway.
For serial connections, &H generally expanded to the empty string.
This seems more useful.
(It so happens that &H _could_ expand to the serial line if it came from
the command-line, but that's accidental.)
Index the older format as 'PEM-style', since PEM is how it's referred to
in OpenSSH's own docs; and justify why you might want to use the newer
format.
When you send a "publickey" USERAUTH_REQUEST containing a certified
RSA key, and you want to use a SHA-2 based RSA algorithm, modern
OpenSSH expects you to send the algorithm string as
rsa-sha2-NNN-cert-v01@openssh.com. But 7.7 and earlier didn't
recognise those names, and expected the algorithm string in the
userauth request packet to be ssh-rsa-cert-v01@... and would then
follow it with an rsa-sha2-NNN signature.
OpenSSH itself has a bug workaround for its own older versions. Follow
suit.
For years I've been following the principle that before I'll add
auto-detection of an SSH server bug, I want the server maintainer to
have fixed the bug, so that the list of affected version numbers
triggering the workaround is complete, and to provide an incentive for
implementations to gradually converge on rightness.
*Finally*, I've got round to documenting that policy in public, for
the Feedback page!
(cherry picked from commit b5645f79dd)
We still don't build or ship a PDF PuTTY manual by default, but we may
as well conveniently expose Halibut's ability to do so.
(I don't guarantee the resulting PDF is particularly pretty -- some of
our overlong code lines do go off the right margin currently.)
(cherry picked from commit f9a8213d95)
Mainly to try to clarify that if you're sat at this warning dialog/
prompt, no response you make to it will cause a new CA to be trusted for
signing arbitrary host keys.
The 'certified host key' variant of the host key warning always comes
with a scary 'POTENTIAL SECURITY BREACH!' message. So the error message
section with the scary title that should acknowledge that variant, and
the section about that variant should mention the scary warning.
To try to prime readers learning the often-seen "unknown host key"
warning to recognise the rarer and scarier "wrong host key" warning, if
they see it.
The previous name, which included '(quantum-resistant)', was too long to
be completely seen in the Windows config dialog's kex list (which is
narrower than the Gtk one, due to the Up/Down buttons). No point
including that explanation if people can't actually read it, so we'll
have to rely on docs to explain it.
(I did try squashing the rest of the name to "SNTRUP/X25519 hybrid", but
that wasn't enough.)
As some sort of compensation, index it more thoroughly in the docs, and
while I'm there, tweak the indexing of other key exchange algorithms
too.
GUI Pageant stopped using SSH identifiers for key types in fea08bb244,
but the docs were still referring to them.
As part of this, ensure that the term "NIST" is thoroughly
cross-referenced and indexed, since it now appears so prominently in
Pageant.
(While I'm there, reword the "it's OK that elliptic-curve keys are
smaller than RSA ones" note, as I kept tripping over the old wording.)
Some new cert-related stuff wasn't documented in the usage message
and/or man page; and the longer-standing "-E fptype" was entirely
omitted from the usage message.
