Up until now, it's been a variadic _function_, whose argument list
consists of 'const char *' ASCIZ strings to concatenate, terminated by
one containing a null pointer. Now, that function is dupcat_fn(), and
it's wrapped by a C99 variadic _macro_ called dupcat(), which
automatically suffixes the null-pointer terminating argument.
This has three benefits. Firstly, it's just less effort at every call
site. Secondly, it protects against the risk of accidentally leaving
off the NULL, causing arbitrary words of stack memory to be
dereferenced as char pointers. And thirdly, it protects against the
more subtle risk of writing a bare 'NULL' as the terminating argument,
instead of casting it explicitly to a pointer. That last one is
necessary because C permits the macro NULL to expand to an integer
constant such as 0, so NULL by itself may not have pointer type, and
worse, it may not be marshalled in a variadic argument list in the
same way as a pointer. (For example, on a 64-bit machine it might only
occupy 32 bits. And yet, on another 64-bit platform, it might work
just fine, so that you don't notice the mistake!)
I was inspired to do this by happening to notice one of those bare
NULL terminators, and thinking I'd better check if there were any
more. Turned out there were quite a few. Now there are none.
The number of people has been steadily increasing who read our source
code with an editor that thinks tab stops are 4 spaces apart, as
opposed to the traditional tty-derived 8 that the PuTTY code expects.
So I've been wondering for ages about just fixing it, and switching to
a spaces-only policy throughout the code. And I recently found out
about 'git blame -w', which should make this change not too disruptive
for the purposes of source-control archaeology; so perhaps now is the
time.
While I'm at it, I've also taken the opportunity to remove all the
trailing spaces from source lines (on the basis that git dislikes
them, and is the only thing that seems to have a strong opinion one
way or the other).
Apologies to anyone downstream of this code who has complicated patch
sets to rebase past this change. I don't intend it to be needed again.
This reverts commit 1b2f39c24b.
The intention of that commit was to support the development of Uppity,
by arranging that I could get a Conf populated with completely default
values by calling load_open_settings(NULL,conf), with no risk of
interference from the normal PuTTY saved sessions full of client-side
configuration (which would have been confusing to apply unexpectedly
in a server).
So I arranged that a NULL session handle was never passed to the
low-level read_setting_[type] functions, in case it caused a segfault.
But I overlooked two things.
Firstly, on Unix, read_setting_* is where we check the tree234 of data
derived from X resources and/or -xrm command-line options. So if you
don't call those functions at all (e.g. if you have no on-disk PuTTY
saved configuration at all, not even Default Settings), you also don't
get your X defaults honoured.
Secondly, those functions themselves already all checked their
argument for NULL before doing anything dangerous with it. So the
thing I wanted to make possible was already possible _anyway_, without
me having to do anything!
So I'm exactly reverting that commit, because the _only_ thing it did
was to introduce a bug in X resource handling.
Those two flags had the opposite sense to what you might expect: each
one is the value of the Conf entry corresponding to the checkbox that
_disables_ the corresponding terminal feature. So term->bidi is true
if and only if bidi is _off_.
I think that confusion of naming probably contributed to the control-
flow error fixed in the previous commit, just by increasing cognitive
load until I couldn't remember which flags were set where any more! So
now I've renamed the two fields of Terminal, and the corresponding
Conf keywords, to be called "no_bidi" and "no_arabicshaping", in line
with other 'disable this feature' flags, so that it's clear what the
sense should be.
This is a fairly shallow patch, which removes the UI and interactions
with external libraries. Some other machinery (which is dead code in
this configuration) is left in place.
Adapted by me from a patch by Jeroen Roovers.
After all the side-channel removal work I've done, I'm demoting
Blowfish and Arcfour right to the bottom of the pile, because they're
the ciphers that still have cache and timing leaks in them. (Neither
one can be sanitised without making it _extremely_ slow - the factor
of 4.5 slowdown in DES would be small by comparison).
Single-DES is also still below the warning threshold for simply being
too weak (irrespective of side channels), but it's above the other two.
Mostly noticed in passing while using Address / Leak Sanitiser to
check over the previous commit. One highlight here is freeing of the
previous iqmp value in rsa_verify, which was actually a potentially
sensitive leak, introduced in the mp_int rewrite (commit 25b034ee3).
For a start, they now have different names on Windows and Unix,
reflecting their different roles: on Windows they apply escaping to
any string that's going to be used as a registry key (be it a session
name, or a host name for host key storage), whereas on Unix they're
for constructing saved-session file names in particular (and also
handle the special case of filling in "Default Settings" for NULL).
Also, they now produce output by writing to a strbuf, which simplifies
a lot of the call sites. In particular, the strbuf output idiom is
passed on to enum_settings_next, which is especially nice because its
only actual caller was doing an ad-hoc realloc loop that I can now get
rid of completely.
Thirdly, on Windows they're centralised into winmisc.c instead of
living in winstore.c, because that way Pageant can use the unescape
function too. (It was spotting the duplication there that made me
think of doing this in the first place, but once I'd started, I had to
keep unravelling the thread...)
My normal habit these days, in new code, is to treat int and bool as
_almost_ completely separate types. I'm still willing to use C's
implicit test for zero on an integer (e.g. 'if (!blob.len)' is fine,
no need to spell it out as blob.len != 0), but generally, if a
variable is going to be conceptually a boolean, I like to declare it
bool and assign to it using 'true' or 'false' rather than 0 or 1.
PuTTY is an exception, because it predates the C99 bool, and I've
stuck to its existing coding style even when adding new code to it.
But it's been annoying me more and more, so now that I've decided C99
bool is an acceptable thing to require from our toolchain in the first
place, here's a quite thorough trawl through the source doing
'boolification'. Many variables and function parameters are now typed
as bool rather than int; many assignments of 0 or 1 to those variables
are now spelled 'true' or 'false'.
I managed this thorough conversion with the help of a custom clang
plugin that I wrote to trawl the AST and apply heuristics to point out
where things might want changing. So I've even managed to do a decent
job on parts of the code I haven't looked at in years!
To make the plugin's work easier, I pushed platform front ends
generally in the direction of using standard 'bool' in preference to
platform-specific boolean types like Windows BOOL or GTK's gboolean;
I've left the platform booleans in places they _have_ to be for the
platform APIs to work right, but variables only used by my own code
have been converted wherever I found them.
In a few places there are int values that look very like booleans in
_most_ of the places they're used, but have a rarely-used third value,
or a distinction between different nonzero values that most users
don't care about. In these cases, I've _removed_ uses of 'true' and
'false' for the return values, to emphasise that there's something
more subtle going on than a simple boolean answer:
- the 'multisel' field in dialog.h's list box structure, for which
the GTK front end in particular recognises a difference between 1
and 2 but nearly everything else treats as boolean
- the 'urgent' parameter to plug_receive, where 1 vs 2 tells you
something about the specific location of the urgent pointer, but
most clients only care about 0 vs 'something nonzero'
- the return value of wc_match, where -1 indicates a syntax error in
the wildcard.
- the return values from SSH-1 RSA-key loading functions, which use
-1 for 'wrong passphrase' and 0 for all other failures (so any
caller which already knows it's not loading an _encrypted private_
key can treat them as boolean)
- term->esc_query, and the 'query' parameter in toggle_mode in
terminal.c, which _usually_ hold 0 for ESC[123h or 1 for ESC[?123h,
but can also hold -1 for some other intervening character that we
don't support.
In a few places there's an integer that I haven't turned into a bool
even though it really _can_ only take values 0 or 1 (and, as above,
tried to make the call sites consistent in not calling those values
true and false), on the grounds that I thought it would make it more
confusing to imply that the 0 value was in some sense 'negative' or
bad and the 1 positive or good:
- the return value of plug_accepting uses the POSIXish convention of
0=success and nonzero=error; I think if I made it bool then I'd
also want to reverse its sense, and that's a job for a separate
piece of work.
- the 'screen' parameter to lineptr() in terminal.c, where 0 and 1
represent the default and alternate screens. There's no obvious
reason why one of those should be considered 'true' or 'positive'
or 'success' - they're just indices - so I've left it as int.
ssh_scp_recv had particularly confusing semantics for its previous int
return value: its call sites used '<= 0' to check for error, but it
never actually returned a negative number, just 0 or 1. Now the
function and its call sites agree that it's a bool.
In a couple of places I've renamed variables called 'ret', because I
don't like that name any more - it's unclear whether it means the
return value (in preparation) for the _containing_ function or the
return value received from a subroutine call, and occasionally I've
accidentally used the same variable for both and introduced a bug. So
where one of those got in my way, I've renamed it to 'toret' or 'retd'
(the latter short for 'returned') in line with my usual modern
practice, but I haven't done a thorough job of finding all of them.
Finally, one amusing side effect of doing this is that I've had to
separate quite a few chained assignments. It used to be perfectly fine
to write 'a = b = c = TRUE' when a,b,c were int and TRUE was just a
the 'true' defined by stdbool.h, that idiom provokes a warning from
gcc: 'suggest parentheses around assignment used as truth value'!
I think this is the full set of things that ought logically to be
boolean.
One annoyance is that quite a few radio-button controls in config.c
address Conf fields that are now bool rather than int, which means
that the shared handler function can't just access them all with
conf_{get,set}_int. Rather than back out the rigorous separation of
int and bool in conf.c itself, I've just added a similar alternative
handler function for the bool-typed ones.
This commit includes <stdbool.h> from defs.h and deletes my
traditional definitions of TRUE and FALSE, but other than that, it's a
100% mechanical search-and-replace transforming all uses of TRUE and
FALSE into the C99-standardised lowercase spellings.
No actual types are changed in this commit; that will come next. This
is just getting the noise out of the way, so that subsequent commits
can have a higher proportion of signal.
All the lowest-level helper functions in settings.c that read a single
setting from a settings_r are now prepared to tolerate being passed a
null settings_r pointer, which will be treated as if reading from it
always failed. This means you can call load_open_settings(NULL, conf)
to populate a Conf with all of the _built-in_ internal defaults,
without ever loading from the saved-session storage at all (not even
Default Settings).
(Doing this will still call the platform_default_foo function family,
if nothing else because Filenames and FontSpecs can't be constructed
in any platform-independent way at all.)
Commit 733fcca2c introduced named types settings_r and settings_w and
made the per-platform storage abstraction use those in place of 'void
*'. But a lot of the intermediate helper functions in the centralised
settings.c, like gpps() and wmap(), were still taking 'void *'. It
still worked, because of C's implicit casting, but it was avoiding the
type-checking advantages from making that change in the first place.
It is useful to be able to exclude the header so that the log file
can be used for realtime input to other programs such as Kst for
plotting live data from sensors.
Most of these were 'void *' because they weren't even reliably a
structure type underneath - the per-OS storage systems would directly
cast read/write/enum settings handles to and from random things like
FILE *, Unix DIR *, or Windows HKEY. So I've wrapped them in tiny
structs for the sake of having a sensible structure tag visible
elsewhere in the code.
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.
Thanks to Jiri Kaspar for sending this patch (apart from the new docs
section, which is in my own words), which implements a feature we've
had as a wishlist item ('utf8-plus-vt100') for a long time.
I was actually surprised it was possible to implement it in so few
lines of code! I'd forgotten, or possibly never noticed in the first
place, that even in UTF-8 mode PuTTY not only accepts but still
_processes_ all the ISO 2022 control sequences and shift characters,
and keeps running track of all the same state in term->cset and
term->cset_attrs that it tracks in IS0-2022-enabled modes. It's just
that in UTF-8 mode, at the very last minute when a character+attribute
pair is about to be written into the terminal's character buffer, it
deliberately ignores the contents of those variables.
So all that was needed was a new flag checked at that last moment
which causes it not quite to ignore them after all, and bingo,
utf8-plus-vt100 is supported. And it works no matter which ISO 2022
sequences you're using; whether you're using ESC ( 0 to select the
line drawing set directly into GL and ESC ( B to get back when you're
done, or whether you send a preliminary ESC ( B ESC ) 0 to get GL/GR
to be ASCII and line drawing respectively so you can use SI and SO as
one-byte mode switches thereafter, both work just as well.
This implementation strategy has a couple of consequences, which I
don't think matter very much one way or the other but I document them
just in case they turn out to be important later:
- if an application expecting this mode has already filled your
terminal window with lqqqqqqqqk, then enabling this mode in Change
Settings won't retroactively turn them into the line drawing
characters you wanted, because no memory is preserved in the screen
buffer of what the ISO 2022 state was when they were printed. So
the application still has to do a screen refresh.
- on the other hand, if you already sent the ESC ( 0 or whatever to
put the terminal _into_ line drawing mode, and then you turn on
this mode in Change Settings, you _will_ still be in line drawing
mode, because the system _does_ remember your current ISO 2022
state at all times, whether it's currently applying it to output
printing characters or not.
Commit d515e4f1a went through a lot of very different shapes before it
was finally pushed. In some of them, GSS kex had its own value in the
kex enumeration, but it was used in ssh.c but not in config.c
(because, as in the final version, it wasn't configured by the same
drag-list system as the rest of them). So we had to distinguish the
set of key exchange ids known to the program as a whole from the set
controllable in the configuration.
In the final version, GSS kex ended up even more separated from the
kex enumeration than that: the enum value KEX_GSS_SHA1_K5 isn't used
at all. Instead, GSS key exchange appears in the list at the point of
translation from the list of enum values into the list of pointers to
data structures full of kex methods.
But after all the changes, everyone involved forgot to revert the part
of the patch which split KEX_MAX in two and introduced the pointless
value KEX_GSS_SHA1_K5! Better late than never: I'm reverting it now,
to avoid confusion, and because I don't have any reason to think the
distinction will be useful for any other purpose.
Simon tells me it was left over from an abandoned configuration design
for GSS key exchange. Let's get rid of it before it starts cluttering
snapshot users' saved sessions.
The former has advantages in terms of keeping Kerberos credentials up
to date, but it also does something sufficiently weird to the usual
SSH host key system that I think it's worth making sure users have a
means of turning it off separately from the less intrusive GSS
userauth.
This is a heavily edited (by me) version of a patch originally due to
Nico Williams and Viktor Dukhovni. Their comments:
* Don't delegate credentials when rekeying unless there's a new TGT
or the old service ticket is nearly expired.
* Check for the above conditions more frequently (every two minutes
by default) and rekey when we would delegate credentials.
* Do not rekey with very short service ticket lifetimes; some GSSAPI
libraries may lose the race to use an almost expired ticket. Adjust
the timing of rekey checks to try to avoid this possibility.
My further comments:
The most interesting thing about this patch to me is that the use of
GSS key exchange causes a switch over to a completely different model
of what host keys are for. This comes from RFC 4462 section 2.1: the
basic idea is that when your session is mostly bidirectionally
authenticated by the GSSAPI exchanges happening in initial kex and
every rekey, host keys become more or less vestigial, and their
remaining purpose is to allow a rekey to happen if the requirements of
the SSH protocol demand it at an awkward moment when the GSS
credentials are not currently available (e.g. timed out and haven't
been renewed yet). As such, there's no need for host keys to be
_permanent_ or to be a reliable identifier of a particular host, and
RFC 4462 allows for the possibility that they might be purely
transient and only for this kind of emergency fallback purpose.
Therefore, once PuTTY has done a GSS key exchange, it disconnects
itself completely from the permanent host key cache functions in
storage.h, and instead switches to a _transient_ host key cache stored
in memory with the lifetime of just that SSH session. That cache is
populated with keys received from the server as a side effect of GSS
kex (via the optional SSH2_MSG_KEXGSS_HOSTKEY message), and used if
later in the session we have to fall back to a non-GSS key exchange.
However, in practice servers we've tested against do not send a host
key in that way, so we also have a fallback method of populating the
transient cache by triggering an immediate non-GSS rekey straight
after userauth (reusing the code path we also use to turn on OpenSSH
delayed encryption without the race condition).
This is a mild security measure against malicious clipboard-writing.
It's only mild, because of course there are situations in which even a
sanitised paste could be successfully malicious (imagine someone
managing to write the traditional 'rm -rf' command into your clipboard
when you were going to paste to a shell prompt); but it at least
allows pasting into typical text editors without also allowing the
control sequence that exits the editor UI and returns to the shell
prompt.
This is a configurable option, because there's no well defined line to
be drawn between acceptable and unacceptable pastes, and it's very
plausible that users will have sensible use cases for pasting things
outside the list of permitted characters, or cases in which they know
they trust the clipboard-writer. I for one certainly find it useful on
occasion to deliberately construct a paste containing control
sequences that automate a terminal-based UI.
While I'm at it, when bracketed paste mode is enabled, we also prevent
pasting of data that includes the 'end bracketed paste' sequence
somewhere in the middle. I really _hope_ nobody was treating bracketed
paste mode as a key part of their security boundary, but then again, I
also can't imagine that anyone had an actually sensible use case for
deliberately making a bracketed paste be only partly bracketed, and
it's an easy change while I'm messing about in this area anyway.
On all platforms, you can now configure which clipboard the mouse
pastes from, which clipboard Ctrl-Ins and Shift-Ins access, and which
Ctrl-Shift-C and Ctrl-Shift-V access. In each case, the options are:
- nothing at all
- a clipboard which is implicitly written by the act of mouse
selection (the PRIMARY selection on X, CLIP_LOCAL everywhere else)
- the standard clipboard written by explicit copy/paste UI actions
(CLIPBOARD on X, the unique system clipboard elsewhere).
Also, you can control whether selecting text with the mouse _also_
writes to the explicitly accessed clipboard.
The wording of the various messages changes between platforms, but the
basic UI shape is the same everywhere.
I know some users don't like any colour _at all_, and we have a
separate option to turn off xterm-style 256-colour sequences, so it
seems remiss not to have an option to disable true colour as well.
2ce0b680c inadvertently removed this ability in trying to ensure that
everyone got the new IUTF8 mode by default; you could remove a mode from
the list in the UI, but this would just revert PuTTY to its default.
The UI and storage have been revamped; the storage format now explicitly
says when a mode is not to be sent, and the configuration UI always
shows all modes known to PuTTY; if a mode is not to be sent it now shows
up as "(don't send)" in the list.
Old saved settings are migrated so as to preserve previous removals of
longstanding modes, while automatically adding IUTF8.
(In passing, this removes a bug where pressing the 'Remove' button of
the previous UI would populate the value edit box with garbage.)
An opcode for this was recently published in
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-sgtatham-secsh-iutf8-00 .
The default setting is conditional on frontend_is_utf8(), which is
consistent with the pty back end's policy for setting the same flag
locally. Of course, users can override the setting either way in the
GUI configurer, the same as all other tty modes.
Also try to upgrade the settings of people who haven't changed the
defaults; but anyone who has, or anyone who's used the pre-release
snapshots with elliptic-curve support, will have to review their
settings manually.
The UI now only has "1" and "2" options for SSH protocol version, which
behave like the old "1 only" and "2 only" options; old
SSH-N-with-fallback settings are interpreted as SSH-N-only.
This prevents any attempt at a protocol downgrade attack.
Most users should see no difference; those poor souls who still have to
work with SSH-1 equipment now have to explicitly opt in.
Previously, due to confusion, it was placed either at the end of the
list or at the start, depending on whether the user had any saved
configuration at all. Now we get to choose a sensible place for it in
the list, and for the moment I think second place behind AES is
reasonable.
It was only prepared to position a new element relative to an existing
one if the latter was specified in the saved configuration, not if the
latter was another element new to this run of gprefs(). This wasn't
deliberate at all: it was just due to me failing to update the 'seen'
bitmap in the loop adding new elements.
Now we actually have enough of them to worry about, and especially
since some of the types we support are approved by organisations that
people might make their own decisions about whether to trust, it seems
worth having a config list for host keys the same way we have one for
kex types and ciphers.
To make room for this, I've created an SSH > Host Keys config panel,
and moved the existing host-key related configuration (manually
specified fingerprints) into there from the Kex panel.
It has three settings: on, off, and 'only until session starts'. The
idea of the last one is that if you use something like 'ssh -v' as
your proxy command, you probably wanted to see the initial SSH
connection-setup messages while you were waiting to see if the
connection would be set up successfully at all, but probably _didn't_
want a slew of diagnostics from rekeys disrupting your terminal in
mid-emacs once the session had got properly under way.
Default is off, to avoid startling people used to the old behaviour. I
wonder if I should have set it more aggressively, though.
Personally I like using Command as the Esc-prefixing Meta key in
terminal sessions, because it occupies the same physical keyboard
position as the Alt key that I'm used to using on non-Macs. OS X
Terminal uses Option for that purpose (freeing up Command for the
conventional Mac keyboard shortcuts, of course), so I anticipate
differences of opinion.
Hence, here's a pair of OSX-specific config options which permit a
user to set either, or neither, or both of those modifier keys to
function as the terminal Meta key.
Having found a lot of unfixed constness issues in recent development,
I thought perhaps it was time to get proactive, so I compiled the
whole codebase with -Wwrite-strings. That turned up a huge load of
const problems, which I've fixed in this commit: the Unix build now
goes cleanly through with -Wwrite-strings, and the Windows build is as
close as I could get it (there are some lingering issues due to
occasional Windows API functions like AcquireCredentialsHandle not
having the right constness).
Notable fallout beyond the purely mechanical changing of types:
- the stuff saved by cmdline_save_param() is now explicitly
dupstr()ed, and freed in cmdline_run_saved.
- I couldn't make both string arguments to cmdline_process_param()
const, because it intentionally writes to one of them in the case
where it's the argument to -pw (in the vain hope of being at least
slightly friendly to 'ps'), so elsewhere I had to temporarily
dupstr() something for the sake of passing it to that function
- I had to invent a silly parallel version of const_cmp() so I could
pass const string literals in to lookup functions.
- stripslashes() in pscp.c and psftp.c has the annoying strchr nature
PuTTY now uses the updated version of Diffie-Hellman group exchange,
except for a few old OpenSSH versions which Darren Tucker reports only
support the old version.
FIXME: this needs further work because the Bugs config panel has now
overflowed.
This provides support for ECDSA public keys, for both hosts and users,
and also ECDH key exchange. Supported curves are currently just the
three NIST curves required by RFC 5656.
This option is available from the command line as '-hostkey', and is
also configurable through the GUI. When enabled, it completely
replaces all of the automated host key management: the server's host
key will be checked against the manually configured list, and the
connection will be allowed or disconnected on that basis, and the host
key store in the registry will not be either consulted or updated.
The main aim is to provide a means of automatically running Plink,
PSCP or PSFTP deep inside Windows services where HKEY_CURRENT_USER
isn't available to have stored the right host key in. But it also
permits you to specify a list of multiple host keys, which means a
second use case for the same mechanism will probably be round-robin
DNS names that select one of several servers with different host keys.
Host keys can be specified as the standard MD5 fingerprint or as an
SSH-2 base64 blob, and are canonicalised on input. (The base64 blob is
more unwieldy, especially with Windows command-line length limits, but
provides a means of specifying the _whole_ public key in case you
don't trust MD5. I haven't bothered to provide an analogous mechanism
for SSH-1, on the basis that anyone worrying about MD5 should have
stopped using SSH-1 already!)
[originally from svn r10220]
I'm about to introduce a configuration option which is really a _set_
of string values (rather than an ordered list), and I'm going to
represent it in Conf as a string->string map (since that's a data type
we already support) in which every key which exists at all maps to the
empty string.
This change modifies settings.c so that it can write out such options
into the saved session as a comma-separated list of the key strings
only, rather than the form 'string1=,string2=,string3=' which you'd
get if you just used the existing wmap().
(Reading the result back in turns out not to need a code change - the
existing code already does what we want if it's reading a list of
key=value pairs and one of them doesn't have an = sign at all.)
[originally from svn r10217]
We now expect that after the server has sent us CHANNEL_CLOSE, we
should not expect to see any replies to our outstanding channel
requests, and conversely after we have sent CHANNEL_CLOSE we avoid
sending any reply to channel requests from the server. This was the
consensus among implementors discussing the problem on ietf-ssh in
April 2014.
To cope with current OpenSSH's (and perhaps other servers we don't
know about yet) willingness to send request replies after
CHANNEL_CLOSE, I introduce a bug-compatibility flag which is detected
for every OpenSSH version up to and including the current 6.6 - but
not beyond, since https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1818
promises that 6.7 will also implement the new consensus behaviour.
[originally from svn r10200]
The basic strategy is described at the top of the new source file
sshshare.c. In very brief: an 'upstream' PuTTY opens a Unix-domain
socket or Windows named pipe, and listens for connections from other
PuTTYs wanting to run sessions on the same server. The protocol spoken
down that socket/pipe is essentially the bare ssh-connection protocol,
using a trivial binary packet protocol with no encryption, and the
upstream has to do some fiddly transformations that I've been
referring to as 'channel-number NAT' to avoid resource clashes between
the sessions it's managing.
This is quite different from OpenSSH's approach of using the Unix-
domain socket as a means of passing file descriptors around; the main
reason for that is that fd-passing is Unix-specific but this system
has to work on Windows too. However, there are additional advantages,
such as making it easy for each downstream PuTTY to run its own
independent set of port and X11 forwardings (though the method for
making the latter work is quite painful).
Sharing is off by default, but configuration is intended to be very
easy in the normal case - just tick one box in the SSH config panel
and everything else happens automatically.
[originally from svn r10083]
Simon Tatham
Jacob Nevins
Jonathan Liu
klemens
Chris Staite