PuTTY wish x11-auth

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summary: Authenticate with local X servers
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: taxing: Needs external things we don't have (standards, users etc)
priority: low: We aren't sure whether to fix this or not.

X11 forwarding currently doesn't even attempt to authenticate with the local X server. In order for it to do so, PuTTY would have to know where to look for authentication data. It would be nice if this were to happen.

A simple approach might be for PuTTY just to pass on authentication data supplied by the X11 client if it has no better ideas. The X Protocol Manual suggests that servers should ignore any authentication they aren't expecting, so this shouldn't break anything that currently works, and it would allow the user to copy back PuTTY's cookie to their real X server.
Ref: <web-71356@meredevice.com>

SGT, 2003-01-14: A couple of days ago I built in the infrastructure for this, since X forwarding in the Unix port of Plink is virtually useless without it. The platform-independent X forwarding code now has the ability to talk either of MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 or XDM-AUTHORIZATION-1 to the local X server, provided a platform-specific function tells it what authentication cookie to use. So it's still not actually supported on Windows (since the Windows version of this function does nothing), but the amount of work that would need to be done to support it is now minimal.

Audit trail for this wish.


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