“The Internet is built with communication in mind. You will
routinely move around the Web from one site to the other or telnet
to another machine to check your mail or to administer that
machine. The trouble with most of these protocols is that they are
not encrypted. Over a telnet connection, your passwords are sent as
plain-text, which can be read by anyone. Using sophisticated
programs called packet sniffers, even a amateur hacker can spy on
your connection and grab your data.”
“Secure Shell (SSH) was built to address these faults and
provide a more secure environment to work in. SSH encrypts all
your traffic including your passwords when you connect to another
machine over the net. SSH also replaces telnet, ftp, rsh, rlogin
and rexec.”
“Let’s take a look at OpenSSH, an excellent and more
importantly open source implementation of SSH. It is very well
supported by the OpenBSD team and includes rock-solid SSH2 support.
Versions are available for nearly all the Unices including Linux,
which is what we are using here.”