PuTTY is a client program for the SSH, Telnet and Rlogin network protocols.
These protocols are all used to run a remote session on a computer, over a network. PuTTY implements the client end of that session: the end at which the session is displayed, rather than the end at which it runs.
In really simple terms: you run PuTTY on a Windows machine, and tell it to connect to (for example) a Unix machine. PuTTY opens a window. Then, anything you type into that window is sent straight to the Unix machine, and everything the Unix machine sends back is displayed in the window. So you can work on the Unix machine as if you were sitting at its console, while actually sitting somewhere else.
This download includes the following tools:
- PuTTY (the Telnet and SSH client itself)
- PSCP (an SCP client, i.e. command-line secure file copy)
- PSFTP (an SFTP client, i.e. general file transfer sessions much like FTP)
- PuTTYtel (a Telnet-only client)
- Plink (a command-line interface to the PuTTY back ends)
- Pageant (an SSH authentication agent for PuTTY, PSCP and Plink)
- PuTTYgen (an RSA and DSA key generation utility).
- Security fix: prevent a nefarious SSH server or network attacker from crashing PuTTY at startup in three different ways by presenting a maliciously constructed public key and signature.
- Security fix: PuTTY no longer retains the private half of users' keys in memory by mistake after authenticating with them.
- Revamped the internal configuration storage system to remove all fixed arbitrary limits on string lengths. In particular, there should now no longer be an unreasonably small limit on the number of port forwardings PuTTY can store.
- Port-forwarded TCP connections which close one direction before the other should now be reliably supported, with EOF propagated independently in the two directions. This also fixes some instances of port-forwarding data corruption (if the corruption consisted of losing data from the very end of the connection) and some instances of PuTTY failing to close when the session is over (because it wrongly thought a forwarding channel was still active when it was not).
- The terminal emulation now supports xterm's bracketed paste mode (allowing aware applications to tell the difference between typed and pasted text, so that e.g. editors need not apply inappropriate auto-indent).
- You can now choose to display bold text by both brightening the foreground colour and changing the font, not just one or the other.
- PuTTYgen will now never generate a 2047-bit key when asked for 2048 (or more generally n−1 bits when asked for n).
- Some updates to default settings: PuTTYgen now generates 2048-bit keys by default (rather than 1024), and PuTTY defaults to UTF-8 encoding and 2000 lines of scrollback (rather than ISO 8859-1 and 200).
- Unix: PSCP and PSFTP now preserve the Unix file permissions, on copies in both directions.
- Unix: dead keys and compose-character sequences are now supported.
- Unix: PuTTY and pterm now permit font fallback (where glyphs not present in your selected font are automatically filled in from other fonts on the system) even if you are using a server-side X11 font rather than a Pango client-side one.
- Bug fixes too numerous to list, mostly resulting from running the code through Coverity Scan which spotted an assortment of memory and resource leaks, logic errors, and crashes in various circumstances.
