PuTTY wish rfc4419

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summary: Support the RFC 4419 revision to Diffie-Hellman group exchange
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: fun: Just needs tuits, and not many of them.
priority: high: This should be fixed in the next release.
fixed-in: 2015-04-25 62a1bce7cb3ecb98feb57c7f1fd5d55845ce1533 0.65

The variant of Diffie-Hellman key exchange in which the server sends a different prime modulus every time (known in SSH as 'group exchange') was revised by RFC 4419 to change the format of the SSH_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_REQUEST message, and also its message number. PuTTY didn't get round to supporting the revised message for quite a long time, but as of 0.65 it will now do so.

As of 6.9, the OpenSSH server has removed support for these messages. It has backwards-compatibility code for old versions of PuTTY (where it disables group exchange), which also triggers for some PuTTY-derived clients, but probably not all of them. If for some reason the backwards-compatibility arrangements don't work, there'll be a message like kex protocol error: type 30 seq 1 [preauth] in the SSH server log.

As of 7.2, the OpenSSH server additionally rejects the old messages with an UNIMPLEMENTED response (bz#2494). If this happens to you (again, if the server's backward-compatibility measures don't fire), you can expect to see a message like "Disconnected: Server protocol violation: unexpected SSH2_MSG_UNIMPLEMENTED packet". (Servers from 6.9 through 7.1 did something less helpful.)


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Audit trail for this wish.
(last revision of this bug record was at 2022-09-11 23:46:37 +0100)