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OpenSSH

Vangie Beal
Last Updated May 24, 2021 7:50 am

Short for Open Secure Shell, OpenSSH is a free suite of tools (similar to the SSH connectivity tools) that help secure your network connections. OpenSSH encrypts all traffic (including passwords) to effectively eliminate eavesdropping, connection hijacking and other network-level attacks.

The OpenSSH suite includes the ssh program that replaces rlogin and telnet, and scp which replaces rcp and ftp. OpenSSH has also added sftp and sftp-server which implement an easier solution for file-transfer. OpenSSH comes in two downloadable distributions: the native OpenBSD distribution and the multi-platform portable distribution. OpenSSH is developed by the OpenBSD Project.