Re: Only one of pageant and ssh-agent?

<google@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Another possibility might be to have Cygwin's ssh ask Pageant for the
key. Is there any sort of shim available that could do this? It would
look like ssh-agent to openssh, but would be able to do what plink
does and ask pageant for a decrypted key.

Minor correction: no application ever asks Pageant (or ssh-agent)
for a decrypted key. If it gave out the actual keys it would be
totally derelict in its duty. Its function is to keep the keys to
itself but provide individual _signatures_ on demand.

But that doesn't affect your main point. A shim layer as you
describe, behaving as an OpenSSH ssh-agent to ssh processes and
behaving as an ssh process to Pageant, sounds like a really good
idea to me. The only slight snag is that the last time we looked
communication between Pageant and Cygwin processes had a strange
Windows security problem, as described here:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/cygwin-clobbers-pageant.html

There's a workaround described there, though, so it's probably not
impossible to rig up something that does the job.
--
Simon Tatham What do we want? ROT13!
<anakin@xxxxxxxxx> When do we want it? ABJ!
.

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