Software update: PuTTY 0.78

Version 0.78 of PuTTY has been released. PuTTY is one of the most popular telnet and ssh clients, allowing remote management of a computer over a secure connection. Originally the program was only available for Windows, but there are now also clients for the various Unix platforms. Due to a problem, Windows users are advised to uninstall the old version first. The changelog for this release can be found below.

Changes in version 0.78:

• Support for OpenSSH certificates, for both user authentication keys and host keys.
• New SSH proxy modes, for running a custom shell command or subsystem on the proxy server instead of forwarding a port through it.
• New plugin system to allow a helper program to provide responses in keyboard-interactive authentication, intended to automate one-time password systems.
• Support for NTRU Prime post-quantum key exchange,
• Support for AES-GCM (in the OpenSSH style rather than RFC 5647).
• Support for more forms of Diffie-Hellman key exchange: new larger integer groups (such as group16 and group18), and support for using those and ECDH with GSSAPI.
• Bug fix: the 32-bit Windows build now runs on Windows XP again.
• Bug fix: server-controlled window title setting now works again even if the character set is ISO 8859 (or a few other affected single-byte character sets).
• Bug fix: certain forms of OSC escape sequences (sent by some real servers) could cause PuTTY to crash.
• Bug fix: the -pwfile/-pw options no longer affect local key passphrase prompts, and no longer suppress Plink’s anti-spoofing measures.

Note: installing the 0.78 or later Windows installer will not automatically uninstall 0.77 or earlier, due to a change we’ve made to work around a bug. We recommend uninstalling the old version first, if possible. If both end up installed, uninstalling both and then re-installing the new version will fix things up.