winssh-pageant

winssh-pageant

Proxy Pageant requests to the Windows OpenSSH agent (from Microsoft), enabling applications that only support Pageant to use openssh.

Background

I use the Windows OpenSSH agent as my single ssh key backing. Many solutions exist that do the opposite of this, but I prefer the convenience of Windows OpenSSH agent.

This has been tested on Windows 10 2004 using WSL2. Earlier versions of windows up to 1803 should work too.

Installation

Install the Microsoft OpenSSH package, found on their Github. Do not install this using Windows update, that one is quite outdated, and will not work with this software.

Download a compiled binary from the releases page or otherwise build it yourself.

Building

clone the repo and build it:

git clone https://github.com/gazzenger/winssh-pageant.git
cd winssh-pageant
go build -ldflags -H=windowsgui

Usage

Run the executable winssh-pageant.exe. There are two (optional) flags:

• --sshpipe - name of the windows openssh agent pipe, default is "\\.\pipe\ssh-pageant"
• --no-pageant-pipe - disable pageant named pipe proxying

Task Scheduler

Until I decide on a better way to do this, you can auto-start this program by creating a task using the Task Scheduler, here are the basic steps:

1. Start the Task Scheduler, on the left pane, select "Task Scheduler Library"
2. Create a Basic Task named winssh-pageant
3. Set the trigger to "When I log on"
4. Set the action to "Start a program"
5. Locate and select the winssh-pageant.exe executable
6. Finish and run the task (or otherwise log out and back in)

Antivirus Flagging

Your antivirus software may flag this as malware, It's a false positive and a known quirk with go binaries (https://golang.org/doc/faq#virus). The official releases use reproducible builds via -trimpath. The expected checksums are posted with the release they're meant for, some users may choose to build this project themself and confirm the checksums, sha256sum.

More information can be found here: https://github.com/gazzenger/winssh-pageant/issues/7#issuecomment-787520972

Bug Reporting, Help & Feature Requests

Please put report all

• Feature Requests
• Bugs
• Help Requests
• General Questsions

as an issue.

Credits

Big thanks to https://github.com/benpye/wsl-ssh-pageant, Ben Pye and the other contributors for the examples of interacting with the win32 api, the build script, and help they have given me directly.

• https://github.com/buptczq/WinCryptSSHAgent for a working example of how to open a file mapping another process created.