What Is SSH

SSH stands for Secure Socket Shell and refers to a protocol that provides network administrators with a secure way to access a remote computer. In other words, the shell is a command interpreter and a part of an operating system that allows users to issue commands and start other programs.

The Secure Socket is the security layer guaranteed by the transmission protocol. SSH, which is currently in its version 2, also refers to the suite of utilities that implement the protocol and which includes:

• Slogin
• SSH
• SCP

These are secure versions of the previously used UNIX utilities (rlogin, RSH, and RCP) that were part of version 1.

Today, SSH is widely used by network administrators for remote management of systems and applications. In fact, SSH allows them to access another computer on a network, execute commands, and move files from one computer to another. If necessary, the protocol uses public key cryptography to authenticate the remote computer and allow the remote computer to authenticate the user.

SSH also supports tunneling, arbitrary TCP port forwarding, and X11 connections. File transfer can be performed using secure file transfer or secure copy protocols (SCP).

At the moment, there are no known vulnerabilities in SSH in its version 2. However, based on the information that was leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 some believe that the US National Security Agency may be able to decrypt SSH traffic.