PuTTY wish pageant-as-service

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summary: Ability to run Pageant as a Windows Service in NT/2000/etc
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits.
priority: never: We don't ever intend to fix this.

People occasionally ask if it's possible to enable running Pageant as a Windows Service.

It's not. This is for two reasons:

Pageant's IPC is pretty ad-hoc, and is done partly through window messages. Hence Pageant needs to have a window open at all times, so it can't run as a persistent service through multiple people's sessions.
Pageant is designed to be used by a single user of a machine (and it contains security code to enforce this). If it ran as a service, it would have to somehow segregate requests from multiple users, maintain lots of separate key databases, do its own internal access control to work out which requests were allowed to access what, and generally things would get a lot more complicated. It's never seemed worth going to this effort.

In any case, I've never been sure of the usefulness of running a long-term SSH agent to supply keys to automated scripts. That doesn't seem much more secure than just leaving the unencrypted key on disk - it might protect you against physical-access attacks in which the attacker shuts the machine down, steals the hard disk, and then can't recover the unencrypted key, but against the much more likely network attack in which the attacker gains access to the still-running machine it's no help because it's almost as easy to read keys out of the agent's memory as it is to read them off disk.

A better solution for automated scripts is to create a dedicated SSH key for each automated task, and restrict the capabilities of that key on the server side. Then just store the private key unencrypted (readable by you only, of course) on the client. That way, if an attacker manages to gain access to the key file, then they don't gain unrestricted access to the account on the server; instead they only gain the specific ability to tamper with the progress of that particular automated script. Also I think it makes the scripts more reliable, because they only depend on disk files, and they're not dependent on the presence of a persistent process that might have (for example) unexpectedly segfaulted or been accidentally killed a day ago.

Audit trail for this wish.

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(last revision of this bug record was at 2004-11-16 15:27:00 +0000)