PuTTY version 0.78 pre-releases are available

[Simon Tatham]

PuTTY version 0.78 pre-releases are available
---------------------------------------------

Hello PuTTY users,

For the first time ever, we're announcing a version of PuTTY via this
mailing list *before* it's released. The official PuTTY 0.78 doesn't
exist yet, but as of now, pre-release builds are available from the
PuTTY website.

Why announce the pre-releases as well as the release? Because we're
hoping that this way, the release itself will be better. If more
people test the pre-releases in ways we don't test ourselves, we can
find as many bugs as possible *before* the release is finalised.
(Instead of two days afterwards.)

If this goes well, I hope we'll announce pre-releases in this way more
often. Probably not for *every* release, but at least releases with
major new features.

Anyway! Pre-release builds of PuTTY 0.78 are now available from the
PuTTY website at

    https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/prerel.html

New features in this release include:

 - Support for OpenSSH certificates in user authentication. If you
   have a certified key for user authentication, PuTTY can now use it,
   either by configuring the certificate file separately from the
   private key, or by making a single .ppk file incorporating both.
   You can also configure a certificate in PuTTY's configuration to
   accompany an ordinary key in Pageant, or load the combined .ppk
   into Pageant itself.

 - Support for OpenSSH certificates in host key checking. Using the
   new "Configure host CAs" button in the "Host keys" config pane, you
   can tell PuTTY about the public key of a certification authority
   you trust, and tell it what host names you trust it to sign keys
   for. Then PuTTY will accept host keys validly signed by that CA,
   without needing the interactive host key prompt every time.

 - Enhancements to the SSH jump-host proxy system. Now, as an
   alternative to telling the proxy SSH server to connect directly to
   the destination IP address, you can tell it to run a shell command
   locally. (For example, an 'nc' command preceded by some other kind
   of necessary setup.) You can also ask the server to invoke a
   specified SSH subsystem, if one is configured that will help.

 - Ability to allow a helper program, or 'plugin', to provide your
   answers to SSH keyboard-interactive authentication. The idea is to
   make it possible to automate one-time password schemes, if the
   passwords can be determined by a program. However, this feature is
   very new and plugins will need to be written before it can be used.
   The specification of how a plugin must work is documented in
   Appendix H of the pre-release version of the PuTTY manual.

 - Cryptography updates: the NTRU Prime post-quantum key exchange
   implemented in OpenSSH, new larger Diffie-Hellman groups, support
   for using those and ECDSA in conjunction with Kerberos, and the
   AES-GCM cipher mode. (The last of those is done in the
   OpenSSH-compatible way, not RFC 5647.)

Bug fixes in this release include:

 - The 32-bit Windows build of 0.77 was accidentally made not capable
   of running on Windows XP. The 0.78 pre-releases do run on XP.

 - If the server tries to set the window title using some single-byte
   character sets (particularly the ISO 8859 family), 0.77 would fail
   to do the character set translation and set the title to the empty
   string. The 0.78 pre-releases get this right again.

Please try out the pre-releases, if you can. We appreciate all
testing, whether it's testing the new features, or testing that the
existing functionality hasn't broken. If you'd like 0.78 to work well
for you, please help us test it before it's final.

Enjoy using PuTTY!

Cheers,
Simon

-- 
import hashlib; print((lambda p,q,g,y,r,s,m: (lambda w:(pow(g,int(hashlib.sha1(
m.encode('ascii')).hexdigest(),16)*w%q,p)*pow(y,r*w%q,p)%p)%q)(pow(s,q-2,q))==r
and s%q!=0 and m)(12342649995480866419, 2278082317364501, 1670428356600652640,
5398151833726432125, 645223105888478, 1916678356240619, "<anakin at pobox.com>"))