SSH is in fact based on very different concepts than the primary architecture of Salt. Salt was designed to communicate with large numbers of remote machines at once; SSH was designed to interact with only one at a time. Let's take a few minutes to examine some of the differences between Salt and SSH.
Let's take a step back in time to when the Internet wasn't around yet and the ARPANET was brand new. To accompany this new concept to nationally and globally-interconnected networks, a series of new protocols were introduced. Telnet, a communication mechanism to take advantage of them, was also introduced. Internet protocols were based on telnet, including a remote shell.
As security needs grew, so did the need to secure telnet. SSH was born; eventually, the OpenSSH project was broadly shipped and supported by a number of Unix-based platforms. While SSH means Secure Shell, it was in fact designed to secure tunnel applications that had traditionally communicated...