Software Update: PuTTY 0.74

A new release of PuTTY has become available. PuTTY is one of the most popular telnet and ssh clients, which makes it possible to remotely manage a computer over a secure connection. Originally, the program was only available for Windows, but today there are also clients for the various Unix platforms. The changelog for version 0.74 can be found below.

These features are new in 0.74:

• Security fix: if an SSH server accepted an offer of a public key and then rejected the signature, PuTTY could access freed memory, if the key had come from an SSH agent.
• Security feature: new config option to disable PuTTY’s dynamic host key preference policy, if you prefer to avoid giving away to eavesdroppers which hosts you have stored keys for.
• Bug fix: the installer UI was illegal in Windows high-contrast mode.
• Bug fix: console password input failed on Windows 7.
• Bug fixes in the terminal: one instance of the dreaded “line==NULL” error box, and two other assertion failures.
• Bug fix: potential memory-consuming loop in bug-compatible padding of an RSA signature from an agent.
• Bug fix: PSFTP’s buffer handling worked badly with some servers (particularly proftpd’s mod_sftp).
• Bug fix: cursor could be wrongly positioned when restoring from the alternate terminal screen. (A bug of this type was fixed in 0.59; this is a case that that fix missed.)
• Bug fix: character cell height could be a pixel too small when running GTK PuTTY on Ubuntu 20.04 (or any other system with a similarly up-to-date version of Pango).
• Bug fix: old-style (low resolution) scroll wheel events did not work in GTK 3 PuTTY. This could stop the scroll wheel working at all in VNC.