8. Conclusion

The SSH protocol is a powerful and practical approach to protecting communications on a computer network. Through its authentication mechanism, SSH enables remote connections, file transfers and other important functions such as tunneling and port forwarding to be carried out in a secure tunnel. The latter two have made SSH the most transparent security protocol for applications. Indeed, an unsecured application can benefit from all SSH's security services without any changes or additions to its code or kernel. SSH alone will maintain the security of application data, authentication of communicating entities, encryption and data integrity control.

However, even if SSH has been able to circumvent many network-related security threats, its specification is still more a software design than a true security protocol. Even though SSH version 2 has become more modular...