Hide Your Communications with OpenSSH
You may find it difficult to trust communication media that you don’t completely control — such as university LANs, wireless home networks, and the Internet. Our point: Trust no one!TipAny public network is potentially dangerous, especially the Internet. One way to protect yourself is to use encryption for all communication. You use encryption when you conduct credit card transactions or read remote e-mail. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) communication is the standard encryption mechanism for secure Internet browsing and e-commerce transactions.The Secure Shell (SSH) protocol is used to conduct encrypted CLI (command-line interface) terminal sessions and file transfers. Red Hat bundles the open source version of SSH called OpenSSH with its distributions. When you install Red Hat Linux, you automatically get the OpenSSH client. You can use OpenSSH from a terminal session by entering the command ssh destination. The destination is the computer you want to communicate with. You can get information about OpenSSH from www.openssh.org.TipUsing encryption is essential when you use wireless networking. Wi-Fi (also known as 802.11b) wireless networks can use built-in encryption based on the WEP protocol. WEP does have some significant security vulnerabilities, though. The only long-term answer is either to wait until the next standard comes along to fix the problem or to use OpenSSH to provide your own encryption. You’re much safer if you use OpenSSH and SSL for as much of your communication as possible.