HAharmath·Dec 12, 2018
just saw this pull req
https://github.com/PowerShell/openssh-portable/pull/360
In Windows Server 2019 Includes OpenSSHPowerShell
openssh-portable
C2017–2023
PowerShell / openssh-portable
openssh-portable
Portable OpenSSH, all Win32-OpenSSH releases and wiki are managed at https://github.com/powershell/Win32-OpenSSH
12Distinct people
12Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Portable OpenSSH, all Win32-OpenSSH releases and wiki are managed at https://github.com/powershell/Win32-OpenSSH
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- powershell/win32-openssh · linked in 3 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 7:56:55 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year12 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-10-23 15:54:33 UTC to 2023-08-29 11:00:20 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesEven right now, you can install sshd and/or use the client by adding them as a feature, or by installing manually.
https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH
and
https://github.com/PowerShell/openssh-portable
In Windows Server 2019 Includes OpenSSH> The service itself sometimes controls which user can access which data,
Sure, but ssh-agent does not. That's what I was alluding to with "major surgery".
Also, while the encrypted keys are stored in the file system or registry, the agent process necessarily has them in unencrypted form. That's the reason for loading keys into the agent in the first place.
To have an ssh-agent that can run as a privileged system service with multiple unprivileged clients, you need to extend it to have some notion of client identity and per-user key space. The standard OpenSSH ssh-agent doesn't have that. Users run their own instance each and if you can connect to it, you can use the keys loaded into it. All of them.
The agent code at github.com/PowerShell/openssh-portable doesn't look any different to me, at least from a cursory glance.
Thus, the decisio
Read the rest
n to run it as a system service seems odd to me.
edit: are they hooking into the agent as a PKCS11 provider/"smartcard" and the plaintext keys never even hit the agent's in-memory table, to be queried by all connected clients?
> I have no idea how the original author soleblaze figured out the correct format of the binary data, but I am so thankful he did and shared.
Good time to point out that we open sourced [0] all of this so I have some guesses as to how soleblaze might have "reverse engineered" it :-)
0. https://github.com/PowerShell/openssh-portable
In Extracting SSH Private Keys from Windows 10 ssh-agent