Security of Credentials

To maintain the highest level of security your should not record your secret credentials (such as password or private key passphrase) anywhere.

Though there may be situations, in which decreased level of security is acceptable in exchange for increased comfort of use. For these situations, WinSCP offer some convenience features. They are listed here in loosely decreasing order of security.

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Using Pageant for Public Key Authentication
Master Password
Keeping Password in Memory
Passing Password to PuTTY
Storing Password
Protecting Credentials Used for Automation

Using Pageant for Public Key Authentication

If you are using public key authentication, you can use Pageant authentication agent to avoid entering your passphrase for every connection.

Master Password

If you want to store your password in site to avoid entering them for every connection, it is recommended to protect them with master password.

Keeping Password in Memory

By default, when you enter your password on authentication window, it is used only for that single authentication. When WinSCP needs to authenticate again, such as when reconnecting, opening additional connection for background transfer or opening separate shell session, you are prompted for your password again.

You can choose to keep the password in memory to allow its reuse on password prompt. You can also opt to remember the password for all sessions using preference option Remember password for duration of the session.1

The same effect (just per-session, not global) has entering your password already to a Password box on the Login dialog. For site you can achieve that by editing it.

Passing Password to PuTTY

Enable preference option Remember session password and pass it to PuTTY to make WinSCP keep password in memory and pass it to PuTTY, when opening a session in PuTTY.

Note that the password is passed to PuTTY using command-line parameter -pw. It is rather easy for other processes (possibly malicious) on your computer to retrieve command-line used to start PuTTY, hence to discover your password. So you should avoid using this option, unless you are confident about security of your computer. Preferred alternative approach is to use public key authentication together with Pageant (PuTTY can use Pageant too).

Storing Password

The least recommended method of handling passwords conveniently is to store them unprotected with your site.

Saved passwords (unless protected by master password) are stored in a manner that they can easily be recovered. It is not possible to securely encrypt passwords in a way that still allows for automatic use. Do not use the save password feature if you are not absolutely sure of the physical and electronic security of the system on which you are storing passwords.

Also note that you need to request storing your password unprotected explicitly on Save session as dialog.

System administrators can restrict password storing altogether.

Protecting Credentials Used for Automation

Learn how to protect credentials used for automation.

Note that the Remember session password and pass it to PuTTY preference option has the same effect, so you have to disable both, to avoid automatic authentication of additional connections.Back