weasel-pageant

weasel-pageant allows you to use SSH keys held by PuTTY's Pageant "daemon" (or compatible, such as the version of Pageant included in PuTTY-CAC or the SSH agent mode in Gpg4win) from inside the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

The source (and this documentation) is heavily based on ssh-pageant 1.4 by Josh Stone, which allows interacting with Pageant from Cygwin/MSYS programs.

weasel-pageant works like ssh-agent, except that it leaves the key storage to PuTTY's Pageant. It sets up an authentication socket and prints the environment variables, which allows the OpenSSH client to use it. It works by executing from the WSL side a Win32 helper program which interfaces with Pageant and communicating with it through pipes.

It is probably the most useful if your SSH keys can't be copied to the WSL environment, such as when using a smart card for SSH authentication. Testing is mainly performed with Pageant-CAC, though Gpg4win has been seen to work in the past. Note that when using Gpg4win, only the SSH agent part will be forwarded. There is no support for forwarding the GPG agent socket.

SECURITY NOTICE: All the usual security caveats applicable to WSL apply. Most importantly, all interaction with the Win32 world happens with the credentials of the user who started the WSL environment. In practice, if you allow someone else to log in to your WSL environment remotely, they may be able to access the SSH keys stored in your Pageant with weasel-pageant. This is a fundamental feature of WSL; if you are not sure of what you're doing, do not allow remote access to your WSL environment (e.g. by starting an SSH server).

weasel-pageant does not work on a version of Windows 10 older than 1703 ("Creators Update"), because it requires the Windows/Ubuntu interoperability support feature shipped with that version. It has been verified to work with versions up to and including Windows 10 release 1903.

Installation

From binaries

Download the zip file from the releases page and unpack it in a convenient location on the Windows part of your drive.

Because WSL can only execute Win32 binaries from drvfs locations, weasel-pageant will not work if unpacked inside the WSL filesystem (onto an lxfs mount). Advanced users may place only helper.exe on drvfs, but in general it is easier to keep the pieces together.

From source

A VS2019 project is included. You will need the "Desktop development with C++" and "Linux development with C++" features. To build:

1. Optional: In Visual Studio, set up an SSH connection to a Linux machine. If you want to build using your local WSL environment, the default configuration should work.

2. Optional: If you intend to work on the Linux sources, copy the contents of /usr/include into linux/include under the project directory. This is not required for the build, but will make Intellisense more useful.

3. Hit Build Solution. Both the Linux executable and the Win32 helper will be built.

If you want to create a binary package, you can use the create_pkg.py script at the root of the project. This should work with Python 3.4 or newer on either Windows or Linux.

Alternatively you can build the Linux executable directly on Linux and only use Visual Studio for the Win32 helper (no Makefile or similar is supplied at the moment). In theory the helper should be buildable with MinGW-w64 for a fully Linux-based build, but this has not been tested.

The release binaries have been built with VS2019 16.2.0.

Usage

Using weasel-pageant is generally similar to using ssh-agent on Linux and similar operating systems.

1. Ensure that PuTTY's Pageant is running (and holds your SSH keys).

   • weasel-pageant does not start Pageant itself.
   • Recommended: Add Pageant to your Windows startup/Autostart configuration so it is always available.

2. Edit your ~/.bashrc (or ~/.bash_profile) to add the following:

    eval $(<location where you unpacked the zip>/weasel-pageant -r)
   

   To explain:

   • This leverages the -r/--reuse option which will only start a new daemon if one is not already running in the current window. If the agent socket appears to be active, it will just print environment variables and exit.

   • Using eval will set the environment variables in the current shell. By default, weasel-pageant tries to detect the current shell and output appropriate commands. If detection fails, then use the -S SHELL option to define a shell type manually.

3. Restart your shell or type (when using bash) . ~/.bashrc. Typing ssh-add -l should now list the keys you have registered in Pageant.

Note regarding the -a flag

A previous version of this manual suggested using the -a flag to set a fixed socket path which could be reused by all open WSL consoles. Due to the limitations of WSL-Win32 interop, this causes problems including hanging SSH agent connections and hanging conhost processes in many use cases. Unless you have a specific need for a fixed socket path, it is better to remove the -a flag froom your weasel-pageant startup command. A weasel-pageant instance will then be started for each WSL console you open.

However, with Windows 10 version 1809 or newer, it is now possible to use a fixed socket path reliably. In addition to the -a flag, also set the -b to prevent the weasel-pageant process from exiting with its parent console. For example to create a persistent socket in your home directory:

eval $(<location where you unpacked the zip>/weasel-pageant -rb -a $HOME/.weasel-pageant.sock)

Options

weasel-pageant aims to be compatible with ssh-agent options, with a few extras:

$ weasel-pageant -h
Usage: weasel-pageant [options] [command [arg ...]]
Options:
  -h, --help     Show this help.
  -v, --version  Display version information.
  -c             Generate C-shell commands on stdout.
  -s             Generate Bourne shell commands on stdout.
  -S SHELL       Generate shell command for "bourne", "csh", or "fish".
  -k             Kill the current weasel-pageant.
  -d             Enable debug mode.
  -q             Enable quiet mode.
  -a SOCKET      Create socket on a specific path.
  -r, --reuse    Allow to reuse an existing -a SOCKET.
  -H, --helper   Path to the Win32 helper binary (default: /mnt/c/Program Files/weasel-pageant/helper.exe).
  -t TIME        Limit key lifetime in seconds (not supported by Pageant).
  -b             Do not exit when tty closes (only use on Windows 10 version 1809 and newer).

By default, the Win32 helper will be searched for in the same directory where weasel-pageant is installed. If you have placed helper.exe elsewhere, the -H flag can be used to set the location.

Known issues

• If you have an SSH_AUTH_SOCK variable set inside screen, tmux or similar, you exit the WSL console from which the screen was initially started and attach to the session from another window, the agent connection will not be usable. This is due to WSL/Win32 interop limitations. This can be circumvented on Windows 10 version 1809 and newer by adding the -b flag to the weasel-pageant command line.

• There is a slight delay when exiting a WSL console before the window actually closes. This is due to a polling loop which works around a WSL incompatibility with Unix session semantics.

Uninstallation

To uninstall, just remove the extracted files and any modifications you made to your shell initialization files (e.g. .bashrc).

Version History

• 2017-06-25: 1.0 - Initial release.
• 2018-03-30: 1.1 - Fixed console/agent connection hangs and enabled restarting of the helper. Upgrade note: remove the -a flag from the weasel-pageant command line unless you know you need it.
• 2019-01-06: 1.2 - Fixed unexpected daemon exits caused by a signal handling issue.
• 2019-03-10: 1.3 - Added the -b flag to prevent the daemon from exiting when its parent terminal closes. Requires Windows 10 1809 or newer. Thanks to @niklasholm for the patch.
• 2019-08-04: 1.4 - Added a workaround for a Win32 interop bug in Windows 10 1903 that wedged the WSL init process into an infinite loop. Also switched to static linking the Linux binary for compatibility with non-glibc distributions such as Alpine.

Bug reports and contributions

Bug reports may be sent using Github's issues feature. Include your weasel-pageant version and command line, describe how to reproduce the problem, and include logs from running in debug mode if possible: run weasel-pageant with the -d flag in either subprocess mode or in a separate terminal in daemon mode (copy/paste the environment variables to your main terminal).

Please do not send bug reports by e-mail.

Pull requests are also welcome, though if you intend to do major changes it's recommended to open an issue first.

Related projects

There are several projects that provide similar functionality (I have not tested all of these):

• ssh-pageant: the Cygwin program on which weasel-pageant is based on.
• wsl-ssh-pageant: a Win32 app that uses the Unix domain socket support introduced in Windows 10 1803 to provide agent connectivity.
• ssh-agent-wsl: a fork of weasel-pageant that includes support for using keys held by Microsoft's SSH Agent service.

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Copyright 2017-2019 Valtteri Vuorikoski & contributors

Based on ssh-pageant, copyright (C) 2009-2014 Josh Stone

Licensed under the GNU GPL version 3 or later, http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

See the COPYING file for license details.
Part of weasel-pageant is derived from the PuTTY program, whose original license is in the file COPYING.PuTTY.