What is SSH?
The common answer to such questions is to a secure shell and use SSH. The only drawback is that SSH is not a shell; it is actually a protocol often referred to SSH1 and SSH2: two different versions of the same protocol, incompatible with each other. Actually, nowadays, we are mostly dealing with SSH version 2 and OpenSSH server; it is the server program from the OpenBSD Project, which is available for a number of platforms.
What are the benefits of SSH and why we use it? Short story long, SSH grants three main facilities:
- Authentication: This means it can make us sure of the identity of the other party. So, when someone tries to connect to our SSH server, the server will be able to obtain a digital proof of identity of the remote party prior to giving it access to the system.
- Encryption: Older protocols such as Telnet and are nice and easy to use, but they have a huge drawback since they send data in clear, so if someone could not breach a server, they could always try to eavesdrop...
