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SSH (Secure Shell)

What is SSH?

SSH (Secure Shell) is a secure replacement for telnet, rlogin, rsh and rcp. It encrypts all traffic, and provides a high level of protection against hacker attacks. Main features of SSH include secure remote logins, terminal emulation, fully integrated secure file transfers, and secure tunneling of X11 traffic.

The University of Minnesota central servers require secure telnet and FTP connections. Some compatible client options are listed below based upon operating system. Consult with your local technical support staff.

Take additional steps to help reduce the risk of SSH password guessing compromises:

Set a strong password on all accounts.
Do not allow root to log in through SSH.
Use host based or network firewalls to limit access to specific IP addresses.

It is particularly important to apply these recommendations to computers running Apple OS/X where administrator accounts are root equivalent.

SSH Clients

SSH clients exist for all common architectures and operating systems. Some are free.

Unix/Linux

Original SSH can be found at ftp.ssh.org/pub/ssh.
OpenSSH is freely usable and re-usable by everyone under a BSD license. OpenSSH is available from http://www.openssh.org/portable.html.

Windows

Cygwin provides a Windows port of the most current OpenSSH tools.
PuTTY is a full-featured, SSH compliant client for Windows. You can get Putty at http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html, as well as PSCP, a tool for encrypted remote file transfer
WinSCP is a freeware Secure Copy (SCP) protocol client for Windows, which can be used to connect to an SSH server, mainly to UNIX machines, for file transfer using the SCP service. http://winscp.vse.cz/eng/
For other free alternatives, see http://www.openssh.org/windows.html
F-Secure is a commercial SSH client available for Windows. The commercial nature of F-Secure results in the need to buy a license for one to use it for an extended period of time. 30-day trial versions are available for those who wish to try F-Secure. Trial versions can be downloaded and commercial versions can be purchased at http://www.f-secure.com/download-purchase/.
Tera Term Pro Web is a free SSH compliant extension for Tera Term Pro, a popular free telnet client for Windows. See http://www.ayera.com/teraterm/
SecureCRT software requires you to purchase a license. http://www.vandyke.com/products/securecrt/

Mac

MacSSH is free software that also allows port forwarding. See http://www.macssh.com The source code is also available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/macssh/
Nifty Telnet-SSH is a free SSH client for the Macintosh available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~jonasw/freeware/niftyssh
For other alternatives, see http://www.openssh.org/windows.html
F-Secure has a commercial SSH client for MacOS. You need to buy a license to use it for an extended period of time. 30-day trial versions are available for those who wish to try F-Secure. Trial versions can be downloaded and commercial versions can be purchased at http://www.f-secure.com/download-purchase/.

Mac OS X

Mac OS X comes with OpenSSH pre-installed. Open the Terminal application from inside the Utilities folder, and then type "ssh user@server_name_or_IP_address" to get started.
Portable OpenSSH is available at http://www.openssh.com/portable.html at no charge. The portable OpenSSH follows development of the official version, but releases are not synchronized. Portable releases are marked with a 'p' (e.g. 2.3.0p1).

More Information

The Secure Shell Frequently Asked Questions at http://www.onsight.com/faq/ssh/ssh-faq.html
SSH at www.ssh.com.
An Introduction to SSH Secure Shell at http://www.giac.org/practical/gsec/Damian_Zwamborn_GSEC.pdf (PDF)
SSH Presentations from the monthly Computer Security Meetings
For more information on departmental implementations, type in "SSH" on the U of M search engine.