PuTTY wish pageant-deferred-decrypt

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summary: Deferred key decryption in Pageant
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits.
depends: pageant-named-pipe
priority: medium: This should be fixed one day.
fixed-in: 8edeecdcfdfaca2fec63ee81f6f28856e695c1ef 2021-04-05 (0.75)

It would be nice if Pageant could support a mode in which it examines a public key file at startup and immediately starts advertising the key to clients, but doesn't actually decrypt the key (hence, does not prompt for a passphrase either) until the first time it's called on to actually generate a signature. Then it would decrypt the key and load it properly.

On Windows, this almost certainly depends on pageant-named-pipe. Also, depending on whether it turns out to be feasible to separate the GUI and agent-request message queues (see discussion in the linked issue), we might have no option but to present not-yet-decrypted keys only to clients using named-pipe IPC, and pretend to old-style WM_COPYDATA clients that those keys aren't loaded at all.

2021-04: implemented, including old Windows clients' ability to work with deferred decryption. (This won't work brilliantly if multiple old clients make blocking requests simultaneously, but that can't be helped.)

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Audit trail for this wish.

(last revision of this bug record was at 2021-04-08 01:12:28 +0100)