This always triggers a bit of a rant from me; I apologize in advance! I wish OpenSSH supported GSSAPI Key Exchange. OpenSSH has for some time supported using

This always triggers a bit of a rant from me; I apologize in advance! I wish OpenSSH supported GSSAPI Key Exchange. OpenSSH has for some time supported using GSSAPI for authentication. What I am referring to is using GSSAPI in place of the normal trust-on-first-use host key verification. GSSAPI Key Exchange was standardized in RFC 4482 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc4462); https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc4462); an updated version (using SHA-2, newer DH groups, and an option for ECDH) is in last call (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-curdle-gss-keyex-sha2/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-curdle-gss-keyex...). GSSAPI Key Exchange is great in environments where systems and are members of a Kerberos realm. They all already trust the realm’s KDCs, and it would be nice to be able to extend that to SSH. It may also be possible to use this in an Active Directory environment, as AD uses Kerberos under the hood for some of its user and machine authentication functions. PuTTY recently got support for GSSAPI Key Exchange, in 0.71 (https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/gss-key-exchange.html https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/..., it already has support for GSSAPI authentication). The OpenSSH developers have confirmed that they will not implement this in OpenSSH (http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1242 http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1242).