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Using Putty and WinSCP with smart cards under Windows

Two free-software projects have had a tremendous success in the past years:
PuTTY is a free SSH client for Windows.
WinSCP is a free SFTP client for Windows.

Unfortunately, neither of these free-software projects support the PKCS#11 interface, i.e. smartcards and USB tokens.

Fortunately, PuTTY was forked to support smartcards:

  • PuTTY-CAC, developped by the US Department of Defense. We were not able to make it work.
  • Putty-SC, which seems to work, although it is quite difficult to use and lacks many features.

PuTTY-SC also provides Pageant-SC, an SSH agent with smartcard support.

With the help of Pageant-SC, WinSCP should be able to work with smartcards.

In this tutorial, you will learn:

  • How to install OpenSC and initialize your smartcard/token.
  • How to install PuTTY-SC and Pageant-SC.
  • How to use WinSCP with smartcards.
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