PuTTY was written back in a time when SSH was proprietary software. It predates the first release of OpenSSH, which I believe was BSD-only at the time, by almost a year.
That aside, the official SSH implementation has never been any princess either. The PuTTY implementation is superior in many ways, not least in terms of modularity, although evidently just as prone to security problems as OpenSSH.
I'm all for new alternative implementations of important pieces of our stack, but please God no more security-critical C.
That aside, the official SSH implementation has never been any princess either. The PuTTY implementation is superior in many ways, not least in terms of modularity, although evidently just as prone to security problems as OpenSSH.
I'm all for new alternative implementations of important pieces of our stack, but please God no more security-critical C.