Microsoft has announced that are going to restart efforts to produce a native SSH client for the Windows platform. Through its PowerShell team, Microsoft intends to make these tools available so that users do not have to rely on 3rd party utilities. The goal is to facilitate easier management of both Windows and Linux systems.
Group Software Engineering Manager Angel Calvo notes that this is the third attempt at Microsoft to provide these tools, alluding to a cultural change at the company that should now make this effort more successful than the previous attempts. Microsoft has chosen to base its tools on the BSD-licensed OpenSSH toolset. The OpenSSH project was started 1999 by the OpenBSD development team, which has a reputation for well written, secure, and maintainable code.
Commenting on this announcement, Microsoft's Jeffrey P. Snover notes that Microsoft's offering will include both an SSH client and a Windows version of SSHD, which is the server-side portion used to host SSH sessions. This would indicate that fully secure communication can occur whether it is or originating or terminating on a Windows machine.
It does appear that this collaboration between Microsoft and OpenSSH is in the early stages based on Twitter traffic. As a Hacker News commentator ( squiguy7 ) pointed out, the OpenSSH developers seemed to be unaware of Microsoft's decision until they went public with their announcement. Regardless, Snover was on Twitter yesterday indicating that they would like “... to make OpenSSH available on Windows as widely as possible”. No specific platforms have been approved or declined for deployment.
