Pageant.exe

The about window of an unregistered copy of pageant.exe

About

Pageant.exe by Dr. Peter Koch is a proprietary replacement for the Putty Agent to support Smartcard such as Yubikeys or other devices that can hold keys (pgp for example). This can be used to natively support Yubikey-based ssh authentication or other functionality of gpg on Windows without installing additional Drivers.

Installation

After downloading from https://smartcard-auth.de, add the executable to the autostart of your account and you are good to go. Most SSH Clients (Putty, MobaXTerm, etc) should just pick the smartcard up when the server sends a publickey request.

Registering your copy

If you've paid for a license of Pageant.exe, put it (only the license key) in a file named LicenseFile.txt in the same directory as the pageant executable.

More information on setup can be found at https://md.ekstrandom.net/blog/2019/10/yubikey-ssh (Archive.org version).