Microsoft has announced that it has chosen to support and contribute towards OpenSSH community. OpenSSH, also known as Open Secure Shell, is a suite of security related tools that work at network level in TCP/IP and helps secure the communication at the level by encrypting, multiple authentication, and secure tunneling the data. OpenSSH community is run by OpenBSD team and is funded by donations by users of the security tools. It is an open source suite and is kept on improving by volunteers who work on network level security protocols in the TCP/IP model.
The Microsoft Powershell team announced on the blog that it had been receiving requests to incorporate OpenSSH into the Powershell and that they have accepted the request. They said they had tried two more times in the past to bring OpenSSH to Powershell but the project was not approved for some or the other reasons. This time, however, the Powershell team is confident about the project being approved and OpenSSH coming to Windows Powershell.
As of now, there are several OpenSSH solutions available but not for Windows. They are customized for Linux and Linux users want something that would work both with Windows Powershell and Linux. As a result, Microsoft Powershell team would be picking up OpenSSH open source and work on it to bring something that would interoperate on both Linux and Windows.
The Powershell team seemed quite happy about it as they said:
Based on these goals, I’m pleased to announce that the PowerShell team will support and contribute to the OpenSSH community – Very excited to work with the OpenSSH community to deliver the PowerShell and Windows SSH solution!
The blog said that it is not possible at the moment to tell the exact dates as to when and how the solutions will be available. The project is just a concept as of now and the team needs time to build a prototype before actually putting it to real world use. That may take some time and hence the uncertainty of when the solutions would be available. The blog says they will post about the dates as soon as possible.
