SSH Introduction
SSH Introduction
What is SSH?
Why are we using it?
This causes some problems as anyone along the way can easily see what you are sending, much like a person at a rest stop can watch your car go by on the freeway. This means someone can easily grab your username and password to our system. With this, they are free to access our system (through your account). Once this happens, our system is no longer secure. Your files may be modified or deleted or someone may attempt to gain root access to our system where they can do severe damage. This is a very bad thing.
To protect your account and our system from this threat, we will be requiring the use of SSH instead of telnet. This is the first step in preventing any passwords from being transmitted in clear text over the network. Since SSH encrypts all traffic with a public-private key scheme, only our server can decrypt it and anyone who intercepts the data in transit will have only garbage data.
What is SCP?
What is SSH Tunneling?
Once your SSH client is configured to tunnel, you will then need to configure your telnet/ftp/email programs to connect to your local machine instead of the remote machine. The SSH program on your machine will accept this connection and forward the data to the remote server through an SSH channel. Once the data arrives on the remote server, it will be unencrypted and forwarded to the local service on the machine. Thus, your client and the remote telnet/ftp/mail server functions normally but all the traffic between the two machines is fully encrypted thus protecting your password.
More information on setting up a tunnel can be found in the platform specific pages below.
Where can I get an SSH program?
- Macintosh (OS9)
- Microsoft Windows
- Unix/Linux/Mac OS X
- Browser based (java)
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The browser based SSH client runs as a java applet to allow you to use SSH from any computer with a web browser. However, because of different java implementations in different web browsers, it will probably not work on all systems and browsers. Specifically, it is known to not work when using Netscape on a Macintosh system.