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CSM Secure Shell:    Simon Tatham's SSH1 & scp clients for Windows

Simon Tatham's SSH1 & scp clients for Windows
(beta 0.45 dated 22Jan99, 185Kb)

Simon Tatham's PuTTY.exe is a small, well written ssh1 client program with very good terminal emulation and a nice graphical interface... an excellent telnet/rlogin replacement for a standalone PC or networked lab (users do NOT need permissions to the system folders to run PuTTY!). We've tested and used it under W95 and NT. No facility for encrypting/tunneling of incoming and outgoing e-mail or exporting of X11 displays (see our information for Cedomir Igaly's SSH client program at http://www.mines.edu/Academic/computer/security/tools/ssh/cigaly.shtml for tunneling capabilities). Source code is available for the curious.

Simon Tatham also has a Windows command-line scp1 client available called pscp.exe. This allows secure/encrypted file transfers and can be used instead of the command-line ftp that comes with Windows.

Info, executables & source at:    http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty.html

Figure 1 shows the default PuTTY settings. A connection using the default "Connection" settings (on port 23) would NOT be an encrypted session. Figure 2 shows Connection settings for a basic ssh (encrypted on port 22) PuTTY session. Clicking "Save" will save the configuration for future use.

Default PuTTY Configuration    Saving a PuTTY 
Configuration

Figure 1 (left): Default PuTTY settings -- unencrypted.
Figure 2 (right): Configuring and saving PuTTY settings for an ssh -- encrypted -- session.

To start an encrypted terminal session, you can either (1) enter the host name of the computer to which you want to connect (the host computer must have be an ssh server) , select the "SSH" protocol button and click "Open"; or (2) select, "Load" and "Open" settings for a session that you saved previously.

The first time you connect with PuTTY to any host, you will be presented with a panel like Figure 3. To continue your connection you must answer "Yes". Answering "Yes" will add the host machine's ssh public key to your local machine's registry.

PuTTY Newhost panel

Figure 3:    PuTTY "New Host" prompt panel.

Login panels using encryption generally look slightly different than unencrypted (telnet) login connections. You should familiarize yourself with the prompts of encrypted vs. unencrypted connections. Figures 4 and 5 show the differences between an unencrypted and encrypted connection to slate using PuTTY. The login prompt for an encrypted PuTTY session might also be similar to:
    Sent username "your_username"
    password:

if you have configured your username in the PuTTY "SSH" configuration tab.


PuTTY unencrypted 
login panel

Figure 4:     A typical unencrypted PuTTY login to slate.

PuTTY login panel

Figure 5:    A typical encrypted PuTTY connection to slate.




**Web & download sites current as of 22March99


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Monday, 30-Oct-2000 16:56:49 MST