Simon Tatham

Simon Tatham is best known as the original author of PuTTY, the ubiquitous open-source terminal emulator and SSH client for Windows, but his current GitHub presence under the handle “NoMoreFood” focuses on extending that legacy with security-hardened forks aimed at enterprise and government environments. PuTTY CAC, the flagship offering, re-packages the familiar lightweight Telnet/SSH/serial toolset with native support for smart-card and certificate-based authentication, enabling seamless logon to Unix servers, network appliances, cloud instances, and secure bastion hosts without exposing passwords. Typical use cases include federal employees logging in with CAC/PIV cards, corporate developers signing Git commits over PKCS#11 hardware tokens, and system administrators automating smart-card logon through Pageant, Plink, PSCP, and PSFTP. The bundle also ships with PuTTYgen enhancements that can import and convert X.509 certificates into SSH public keys, making it straightforward to migrate legacy PKI infrastructure to modern SSH certificate authorities. Because the entire suite remains portable—no administrator rights or installation required—it fits equally well on locked-down office desktops, jump-boxes, and encrypted USB sticks carried by field engineers. Simon Tatham’s PuTTY CAC is available for free on get.nero.com, where downloads are sourced from trusted Windows package managers such as winget, always deliver the latest release, and can be installed individually or in batch alongside other utilities.