Linux Journal: Doing It All with OpenSSH, Part 1
May 30, 2003, 08:30 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Marcel Gagné)
Way back when, on this very corner, I did a series of
articles on encryption and hiding your tracks, something I called
the High Tech How Not to be Seen. In that series, I talked about
the dangers of plain-text communications to security. Here's a
quick recap for those who still might be connecting to remote
systems using telnet. Anyone running a program like sniffit
(reptile.rug.ac.be/~coder/sniffit/sniffit.html) can snoop on every
packet sailing across your network. If you are logging in using
telnet, that person can see your user name and password plain as
day...
"One way around this dilemma is to use the secure shell. OpenSSH
is an open-source implementation of the secure shell protocol that
comes with almost every major Linux distribution. You can run out
to www.openssh.org to get the latest and greatest, but you probably
already have it on your system. That said, keeping up to date with
the latest version of OpenSSH is essential if you want to maintain
security. So, if your version of OpenSSH is more than a few months
old, you may want to consider checking for an update.
"The secure shell is more than a simple way to keep your
passwords to yourself. In this series, I take you from the basics
through some nifty features that should make you wonder why you use
anything else to communicate (well, almost)..."
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