PuTTY () is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

terminal emulator A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term ''terminal'' covers all remote term ...

, serial console and network file transfer application. It supports several

network protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics, and synchronization of ...

s, including SCP,

SSH The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH Protocol) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution. SSH was designed for Un ...

Telnet Telnet (sometimes stylized TELNET) is a client-server application protocol that provides access to virtual terminals of remote systems on local area networks or the Internet. It is a protocol for bidirectional 8-bit communications. Its main ...

rlogin The Berkeley r-commands are a suite of computer programs designed to enable users of one Unix system to log in or issue commands to another Unix computer via TCP/IP computer network. The r-commands were developed in 1982 by the Computer System ...

, and raw socket connection. It can also connect to a

serial port A serial port is a serial communication Interface (computing), interface through which information transfers in or out sequentially one bit at a time. This is in contrast to a parallel port, which communicates multiple bits simultaneously in Pa ...

. The name "PuTTY" has no official meaning. PuTTY was originally written for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

, but it has been

ported In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desig ...

to various other

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s. Official ports are available for some

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

platforms, with work-in-progress ports to and , and unofficial ports have been contributed to platforms such as

Symbian Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones. It was originally developed as a proprietary software OS for personal digital assistants in 1998 by the Symbian Ltd. consortium. Symbian OS ...

Windows Mobile Windows Mobile is a discontinued mobile operating system developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDA). Designed to be the portable equivalent of the Windows desktop OS in the emerging Mobile device, mobile/port ...

and

Windows Phone Windows Phone (WP) is a discontinued mobile operating system developed by Microsoft Mobile for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone featured a new user interface derived from the Metro design languag ...

. PuTTY was written and is maintained primarily by

Simon Tatham Simon Tatham (born 3 May 1977) is a British computer programmer. He created and maintains PuTTY, a free software implementation of Secure Shell (SSH) and Telnet for Microsoft Windows and Unix, along with an xterm terminal emulator. He is also ...

, a British programmer.

Features

PuTTY supports many variations on the secure remote terminal, and provides user control over the

encryption key and protocol version, alternate ciphers such as AES, 3DES,

RC4 In cryptography, RC4 (Rivest Cipher 4, also known as ARC4 or ARCFOUR, meaning Alleged RC4, see below) is a stream cipher. While it is remarkable for its simplicity and speed in software, multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in RC4, ren ...

Blowfish Tetraodontidae is a family of marine and freshwater fish in the order Tetraodontiformes. The family includes many familiar species variously called pufferfish, puffers, balloonfish, blowfish, blowers, blowies, bubblefish, globefish, swellfish, ...

, DES, and

public-key Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is the field of cryptographic systems that use pairs of related keys. Each key pair consists of a public key and a corresponding private key. Key pairs are generated with cryptographic alg ...

authentication. PuTTY uses its own format of key files – PPK (protected by ''Message Authentication Code''). PuTTY supports SSO through

GSSAPI The Generic Security Service Application Programming Interface (GSSAPI, also GSS-API) is an application programming interface for programs to access security services. The GSSAPI is an IETF standard that addresses the problem of many similar but ...

, including user provided GSSAPI DLLs. It also can emulate control sequences from

xterm xterm is the standard terminal emulator for the X Window System. It allows users to run programs which require a command-line interface. If no particular program is specified, xterm runs the user's Unix shell, shell. An X display device, dis ...

VT220 The VT200 series is a family of computer terminals introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in November 1983. The VT220 was the basic version, a text-only version with multi-lingual capabilities. The VT240 added monochrome ReGIS vecto ...

VT102 The VT100 is a video terminal, introduced in August 1978 by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was one of the first terminals to support ANSI escape codes for cursor control and other tasks, and added a number of extended codes for special ...

ECMA-48 ANSI escape sequences are a standard for in-band signaling to control cursor location, color, font styling, and other options on video text terminals and terminal emulators. Certain sequences of bytes, most starting with an ASCII escape cha ...

terminal emulation A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term ''terminal'' covers all remote termi ...

, and allows local, remote, or dynamic

port forwarding In computer networking, port forwarding or port mapping is an application of network address translation (NAT) that redirects a communication request from one address and port number combination to another while the packets are traversing a netwo ...

with SSH (including

X11 The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

forwarding). The network communication layer supports

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communication protocol, communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic ...

, and the SSH protocol supports the

zlib zlib ( or "zeta-lib", ) is a software library used for data compression as well as a data format. zlib was written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compre ...

@openssh.com delayed compression scheme. It can also be used with local serial port connections. PuTTY comes bundled with command-line SCP and SFTP clients, called "pscp" and "psftp" respectively, and plink, a command-line connection tool, used for non-interactive sessions. PuTTY does not support session tabs directly, but many wrappers are available that do.

History

PuTTY development began in 1996, and was a usable SSH-2 client by October 2000.

Components

PuTTY consists of several components: ; PuTTY: the

, and

client itself, which can also connect to a

; PSCP: an SCP client, i.e. command-line secure file copy. Can also use SFTP to perform transfers ; PSFTP: an SFTP client, i.e. general file transfer sessions much like

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

; PuTTYtel: a Telnet-only client ; Plink: a command-line interface to the PuTTY back ends. Usually used for

SSH Tunneling In computer networks, a tunneling protocol is a communication protocol which allows for the movement of data from one network to another. They can, for example, allow private network communications to be sent across a public network (such as the I ...

; Pageant: an SSH authentication agent for PuTTY, PSCP and Plink ; PuTTYgen: an RSA, DSA,

ECDSA In cryptography, the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) offers a variant of the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) which uses elliptic-curve cryptography. Key and signature sizes As with elliptic-curve cryptography in general, the ...

and EdDSA key generation utility ; pterm: (Unix version only) an X11 client which supports the same terminal emulation as PuTTY

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Putty 1998 software Cross-platform free software Cryptographic software Free communication software Free software programmed in C Free terminal emulators Portable software Secure Shell SSH File Transfer Protocol clients Software using the MIT license Symbian software Telnet

Features

History

Components

See also

References

External links