cngeant

A drop-in replacement for PuTTY's Pageant that uses Windows' key-store for secure and password-less experience.

The keys can also be stored in your computer's TPM module for additional security.

Getting Started

• Get the latest release,
• run it,
• generate a new key pair,
• copy the public key to clipboard, and
• add it among your github SSH keys.

Compatibility

The agent should be able to provide keys to PuTTy clients immendiately after its started. Make sure to run the agent non-elevated, otherwise it won't be able to service non-elevated PuTTy clients.

Furthermore, cngeant provides ssh-agent services via a cygwin (think Git for Windows) and an AF_UNIX socket. Both are created in your temp folder and are named cngeant.cygsock and cngeant.sock respectively.

The ssh client distributed with Git for Windows should be able to use the cygwin socket as soon as it picks up the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable. The shell picks the variable immediately, it should be sufficient restart your applications after starting cngeant for the first time.

The AF_UNIX socket can be used by WSL's ssh client. Add the following to your ~/.bashrc file.

export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/mnt/c/Users/$USER/AppData/Local/Temp/cngeant.sock

Features

• Supports SSH2 with RSA or ECDSA (with p256, p384 and p521 curves).
• Private keys are stored per-user. You can't share a single key between users.
• Generated private keys are not exportable. You need a fresh key for each computer and user account.

TODO

• Importing private keys.
• Better GUI.
• An icon.
• Notify the user when a key is used.