ssh: Secure Shell

The design of ssh is full of hooks for future extensibility. First of all, the client and the server exchange a “software version” and a “protocol version” at the beginning of each section. While the “software version”is mainly used in debugging problems, the “protocol version” is a great resource to accomplish smooth upgrading from one version of the software to the next one. Both the client and the server are required to support at least the previous version of the protocol, in addition to the current one. This requirement is designed to help deal with the transition period whenever the protocol gets enhanced (which doesn't happen too often). When running ssh<\!s>-v, you can see, among other things, the exchange of version strings.

Another great design feature of the protocol is that new cryptographic algorithms (“ciphers”) can be added to the basic machinery without losing generality. This is accomplished by making the choice of the cipher to use at runtime. During handshake (the first few packets being exchanged by the communicating parties), the server declares which ciphers it supports, and the client chooses one of those ciphers. Every ssh implementation is required to support at least 3DES, in order to ensure a secure link can be established between any client and any server. Users and/or organizations are, nevertheless, free to implement new ciphers and specify them as the default choice. A few ciphers are part of the official ssh distribution, and the user can ask for a specific algorithm on the ssh command line to override the default.

The protocol also supports compression of session data. A compressed session can actually be faster than a non-compressed one, if the local network is slightly loaded. Once again, compression is optional, and the communicating parties agree whether or not to use it.

The standardization efforts endorsed by the IETF are aimed at defining version 2.0 of the secure shell protocol (the version supported by ssh-1.2.20 is called 1.5). The Internet drafts currently available document three different aspects of the upcoming 2.0 protocol:

These documents are quite technical, but very interesting to peruse. The protocol the IETF is working on looks promising, giving even more flexibility than the current one.

The curious reader is urged to browse the network to retrieve more information on these topics. I can provide a few pointers to begin with, but I'm pretty sure you'll find several more pointers about this kind of topic.

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