14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this summer, Microsoft announced initial plans to officially support OpenSSH on Windows, and now, after a summer-long coding session alongside developers from NoMachine, the company has not only made headway with its work, but is also doing something unthinkable a few years back, and open-sourcing the code, remaining aligned with the spirit and customs of the SSH community.
OpenSSH stands for OpenBSD Secure Shell, and is a collection of security tools and utilities based around the SSH (Secure Shell) protocol. If you're not familiar, the SSH protocol is one of the safest ways through which users can authenticate on other computers over unsecured networks.
The protocol and the subsequent OpenSSH tools have been widely adopted in the *NIX community and have been at the base of many security products.
Microsoft's OpenSSH port will be part of PowerShell
Back in June, after decades during which it had practically ignored OpenSSH, Microsoft announced initial plans to support some of the tools inside the Windows PowerShell, a powerful task automation framework made up of a command-line shell and a special scripting language built on top of the .NET Framework.
While previously the NoMachine team had worked to port some of the OpenSSH code to work on Windows architectures, the Redmond company decided that, instead of starting from scratch, it was better off helping NoMachine update their Windows version of OpenSSH from version 5.9 to version 7.1, to perfectly mirror the latest OpenSSH release.
OpenSSH for Windows is available on GitHub, same simplified BSD license
Realizing the monumental task ahead, Microsoft's head developers decided to open-source all their work on GitHub, and allow others to contribute as well.
Besides updating the code to OpenSSH 7.1, Microsoft also plans to replace the faulty OpenSSL/LibreSSL library with the Windows Crypto API and run it as a service, fix other POSIX compatibility problems, and then go through a session of code quality control.
"At this point, the roadmap is specifically around providing a Windows port of OpenSSH with complete feature parity and interoperability," said Steve Lee, Principal Software Engineer Manager on Microsoft's PowerShell Team.