Subject: Specification for agent protocol

From: Damien Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 May 2016 17:29:06 +1000 (AEST)

Hi,

A few people have asked over the years for a proper specification of the
agent protocol that most SSH implementations support. I've maintained
the PROTOCOL.agent file[1] in the OpenSSH source distribution as a
half-assed standard for some time, but I think that the protocol is
widely used enough to warrant an actual RFC.

So I've converted the half-assed documentation into something
a little bit more formal and published it as an I-D at
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-miller-ssh-agent-00

This is pretty much exactly the protocol as OpenSSH implements it. The
main changes from PROTOCOL.agent (for those who are familiar with it)
are removal of SSH v.1 bits and adding a couple of backwards-compatible
extension mechanisms to support [email-masked] extensibility.

I'd welcome any feedback and/or assistance in getting it completed and
published. Thanks to Simon Tatham for reviewing an earlier version.

-d

[1] https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/blob/master/PROTOCOL.agent