A Practical Guide to Red HatВ® LinuxВ®: Fedoraв„ў Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (3rd Edition)

18. OpenSSH: Secure Network Communication

OpenSSH is a suite of secure network connectivity tools that replaces telnet, rcp, rsh/rshd, rlogin/rlogind, and ftp/ftpd. Unlike the tools it replaces, OpenSSH tools encrypt all traffic, including passwords. In this way they thwart malicious users who would eavesdrop, hijack connections, and steal passwords.

This chapter covers the following OpenSSH tools:

• scp Copies files to/from another system

• sftp Copies files to/from other systems (a secure replacement for ftp)

• ssh Runs a command on or logs in on another system

• sshd The OpenSSH daemon (runs on the server)

• ssh-keygen Creates RSA or DSA host/user authentication keys