OpenSSH is a FREE version of the SSH connectivity tools that technical users of the Internet rely on. Users of telnet, rlogin, and ftp may not realize that their password is transmitted across the Internet unencrypted, but it is. OpenSSH encrypts all traffic (including passwords) to effectively eliminate eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other attacks. Additionally, OpenSSH provides secure tunneling capabilities and several authentication methods, and supports all SSH protocol versions.
The OpenSSH suite replaces rlogin and telnet with the sshprogram, rcp with scp, and ftp with sftp. Also included is sshd(the server side of the package), and the other utilities like ssh-add, ssh-agent, ssh-keysign, ssh-keyscan, ssh-keygen and sftp-server.
OpenSSH is developed by the OpenBSD Project. The software is developed in countries that permit cryptography export and is freely useable and re-useable by everyone under a BSD license. However, development has costs, so if you find OpenSSH useful (particularly if you use it in a commercial system that is distributed) please consider donating to help fund the project.
OpenSSH is developed by two teams. One team does strictly OpenBSD-based development, aiming to produce code that is as clean, simple, and secure as possible. We believe that simplicity without the portability "goop" allows for better code quality control and easier review. The other team then takes the clean version and makes it portable (adding the "goop") to make it run on many operating systems -- the so-called -p releases, ie "OpenSSH 4.0p1".
Changes since OpenSSH 6.4
=========================
This is a feature-focused release.
New features:
* ssh(1), sshd(8): Add support for key exchange using elliptic-curve
Diffie Hellman in Daniel Bernstein's Curve25519. This key exchange
method is the default when both the client and server support it.
* ssh(1), sshd(8): Add support for Ed25519 as a public key type.
Ed25519 is a elliptic curve signature scheme that offers
better security than ECDSA and DSA and good performance. It may be
used for both user and host keys.
* Add a new private key format that uses a bcrypt KDF to better
protect keys at rest. This format is used unconditionally for
Ed25519 keys, but may be requested when generating or saving
existing keys of other types via the -o ssh-keygen(1) option.
We intend to make the new format the default in the near future.
Details of the new format are in the PROTOCOL.key file.
* ssh(1), sshd(8): Add a new transport cipher
"chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com" that combines Daniel Bernstein's
ChaCha20 stream cipher and Poly1305 MAC to build an authenticated
encryption mode. Details are in the PROTOCOL.chacha20poly1305 file.
* ssh(1), sshd(8): Refuse RSA keys from old proprietary clients and
servers that use the obsolete RSA+MD5 signature scheme. It will
still be possible to connect with these clients/servers but only
DSA keys will be accepted, and OpenSSH will refuse connection
entirely in a future release.
* ssh(1), sshd(8): Refuse old proprietary clients and servers that
use a weaker key exchange hash calculation.
* ssh(1): Increase the size of the Diffie-Hellman groups requested
for each symmetric key size. New values from NIST Special
Publication 800-57 with the upper limit specified by RFC4419.
* ssh(1), ssh-agent(1): Support PKCS#11 tokens that only provide
X.509 certs instead of raw public keys (requested as bz#1908).
* ssh(1): Add a ssh_config(5) "Match" keyword that allows
conditional configuration to be applied by matching on hostname,
user and result of arbitrary commands.
* ssh(1): Add support for client-side hostname canonicalisation
using a set of DNS suffixes and rules in ssh_config(5). This
allows unqualified names to be canonicalised to fully-qualified
domain names to eliminate ambiguity when looking up keys in
known_hosts or checking host certificate names.
* sftp-server(8): Add the ability to whitelist and/or blacklist sftp
protocol requests by name.
* sftp-server(8): Add a sftp "fsync@openssh.com" to support calling
fsync(2) on an open file handle.
* sshd(8): Add a ssh_config(5) PermitTTY to disallow TTY allocation,
mirroring the longstanding no-pty authorized_keys option.
* ssh(1): Add a ssh_config ProxyUseFDPass option that supports the
use of ProxyCommands that establish a connection and then pass a
connected file descriptor back to ssh(1). This allows the
ProxyCommand to exit rather than staying around to transfer data.
Bugfixes:
* ssh(1), sshd(8): Fix potential stack exhaustion caused by nested
certificates.
* ssh(1): bz#1211: make BindAddress work with UsePrivilegedPort.
* sftp(1): bz#2137: fix the progress meter for resumed transfer.
* ssh-add(1): bz#2187: do not request smartcard PIN when removing
keys from ssh-agent.
* sshd(8): bz#2139: fix re-exec fallback when original sshd binary
cannot be executed.
* ssh-keygen(1): Make relative-specified certificate expiry times
relative to current time and not the validity start time.
* sshd(8): bz#2161: fix AuthorizedKeysCommand inside a Match block.
* sftp(1): bz#2129: symlinking a file would incorrectly canonicalise
the target path.
* ssh-agent(1): bz#2175: fix a use-after-free in the PKCS#11 agent
helper executable.
* sshd(8): Improve logging of sessions to include the user name,
remote host and port, the session type (shell, command, etc.) and
allocated TTY (if any).
* sshd(8): bz#1297: tell the client (via a debug message) when
their preferred listen address has been overridden by the
server's GatewayPorts setting.
* sshd(8): bz#2162: include report port in bad protocol banner
message.
* sftp(1): bz#2163: fix memory leak in error path in do_readdir().
* sftp(1): bz#2171: don't leak file descriptor on error.
* sshd(8): Include the local address and port in "Connection from
..." message (only shown at loglevel>=verbose).
Portable OpenSSH:
* Please note that this is the last version of Portable OpenSSH that
will support versions of OpenSSL prior to 0.9.6. Support (i.e.
SSH_OLD_EVP) will be removed following the 6.5p1 release.
* Portable OpenSSH will attempt compile and link as a Position
Independent Executable on Linux, OS X and OpenBSD on recent gcc-
like compilers. Other platforms and older/other compilers may
request this using the --with-pie configure flag.
* A number of other toolchain-related hardening options are used
automatically if available, including -ftrapv to abort on signed
integer overflow and options to write-protect dynamic linking
information. The use of these options may be disabled using the
--without-hardening configure flag.
* If the toolchain supports it, one of the -fstack-protector-strong,
-fstack-protector-all or -fstack-protector compilation flag are
used to add guards to mitigate attacks based on stack overflows.
The use of these options may be disabled using the
--without-stackprotect configure option.
* sshd(8): Add support for pre-authentication sandboxing using the
Capsicum API introduced in FreeBSD 10.
* Switch to a ChaCha20-based arc4random() PRNG for platforms that do
not provide their own.
* sshd(8): bz#2156: restore Linux oom_adj setting when handling
SIGHUP to maintain behaviour over retart.
* sshd(8): bz#2032: use local username in krb5_kuserok check rather
than full client name which may be of form user@REALM.
* ssh(1), sshd(8): Test for both the presence of ECC NID numbers in
OpenSSL and that they actually work. Fedora (at least) has
NID_secp521r1 that doesn't work.
* bz#2173: use pkg-config --libs to include correct -L location for
libedit.