I find Pageant to be less stable and user-friendly than the traditional SSH agent, but you can use either. The main reason to use Pageant is if you use putty-cac for interfacing with non-PKCS#11 smart cards and certificates that are only available via the Microsoft CAPI (including the TPM-backed certificates from my previous post)¹ ². Let's fix that!įirst, you’ll need to decide whether you want to use Pageant or the native SSH Agent. It also includes a native windows build of OpenSSH, which means you don't even need to use WSL to SSH into your other machines! Unfortunately, neither option has any ssh-agent running by default, so if you have passphrase protected keys (which you should), then you'll need to enter the passphrase every time you want to use them. The first is the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which implements a subset of the Linux Kernel’s system calls to allow you to run native Linux userland utilities such as bash and friends, and ssh. Windows 10 ships with two awesome features for users and developers who still work in Linux land.

Ssh tool windows 10