Patch 'n Package puttytools

Provides a patched version of puttygen which allows accepting passwords via cli arguments.

2019-07-26 Update

This patch will not be maintained since you can use the --old-passphrase and --new-passphrase command to achieve the same thing as of puttygen version 0.72.

Why?

I use Ansible to manage my server configurations and I'm writing a plugin which allows using KeePass as a store for secrets (instead of using Ansible Vault). This plugin also allows you to generate secrets on the fly, including SSH keys. Since some of my customers use windows systems/putty, I also wanted the plugin to be able to automatically convert SSH keys to the PuTTY format. However, since puttygen by default does not accept password entered on the command line, I needed a solution, which is this patch.

$ puttygen --help
PuTTYgen: key generator and converter for the PuTTY tools
Release 0.70
Usage: puttygen ( keyfile | -t type [ -b bits ] ) [ -N passphrase ]
                [ -C comment ] [ -P ] [ -q ]
                [ -o output-keyfile ] [ -O type | -l | -L | -p ]
  -t    specify key type when generating (ed25519, ecdsa, rsa, dsa, rsa1)
  -b    specify number of bits when generating key
  -C    change or specify key comment
  -P    change key passphrase
  -q    quiet: do not display progress bar
  -N    new or existing passphrase
  -O    specify output type:
           private             output PuTTY private key format
           private-openssh     export OpenSSH private key
           private-openssh-new export OpenSSH private key (force new format)
           private-sshcom      export ssh.com private key
           public              RFC 4716 / ssh.com public key
           public-openssh      OpenSSH public key
           fingerprint         output the key fingerprint
  -o    specify output file
  -l    equivalent to `-O fingerprint'
  -L    equivalent to `-O public-openssh'
  -p    equivalent to `-O public'
  --old-passphrase file
        specify file containing old key passphrase
  --new-passphrase file
        specify file containing new key passphrase
  --random-device device
        specify device to read entropy from (e.g. /dev/urandom)

What?

This script was specifically created for my purposes; it's not very portable, only tested on Ubuntu LTS 16 & 18 and does a bunch more than just patching putty. It also builds the binaries, packages the binaries using FPM and adds them to my local reprepro repository. If you're just interested in the patch, take a look at the cmdgen.option-N.patch file, or strip whatever you don't need from the patch-n-package-puttytools.sh script to suit your needs. If you have any suggestions or improvements, please feel free to let me know! :-)

Credits

I used the information from this blog as a starting point: https://itefix.net/content/puttygen-patch-entering-passphrases-command-line

netson / patch-n-package-puttytools Goto Github PK