PuTTY bug pubkeyfile-and-pageant

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summary: Pageant + explicit keyfile gives non-optimal behaviour
class: bug: This is clearly an actual problem we want fixed.
difficulty: fun: Just needs tuits, and not many of them.
priority: medium: This should be fixed one day.
present-in: 0.53b
fixed-in: r6459 de945281fc4752ecf5f2974b59298f6dbf6f51ee 2005-11-14 (0.59)

When Pageant is running and a keypair is explicitly specified (via -i, configuration or whatever), PuTTY will try authenticating with all the keys in Pageant regardless. This isn't ideal for various reasons.

This is particularly obvious when several keys are valid for a given connection (e.g., if one is trying to use a particular key to run a particular forced command). It can also cause problems if Pageant has lots of keys and the server (e.g. OpenSSH) is configured to only allow a certain number of authentication attempts. See the errors chapter of the PuTTY manual.

Update, 2005-11-14: If Pageant is running and a keyfile is specified, PuTTY will now only try Pageant authentication with that key; it will ignore any other keys Pageant may have.

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Audit trail for this bug.

(last revision of this bug record was at 2016-12-27 11:40:21 +0000)