#Transmit 5 ssh verification#

The symmetric key is just a string of letters stored somewhere on the computers. How does this work?īoth computers have an identical version of a symmetric key. Both computers need to have a way of encrypting the information so that only the other computer can decrypt the information and understand it. How does this information get encrypted?Įncrypting essentially just means ‘jumbling up the letters’ using some clever maths. Setting up an encrypted channelĪ core part of the SSH protocol is that is it secure (it is in even in the name!), meaning all information that is sent using SSH is encrypted. This process is called authentication using asymmetric encryption.Įach of these sections below will go into more detail on these steps.

#Transmit 5 ssh verification#

This is another form of verification but here we are verifying the identity of the computer.Īfter these three steps, we can now communicate securely with a remote computer.Īfter these steps, we can share ‘secret’ data securely and we can also check if a client has permission to access a host in a more secure way than using a password. We need a way of checking that the computer we are communicating with isn’t an imposter. This called verification and here we are verifying the integrity of the data that is sent by the client.

We need a way of checking that the data received by the host hasn’t been tampered with.

First we need a way of setting up a secure method of exchanging messages between the computers.

There are several processes that need to happen between two computers in order for an SSH session to begin. This encoding/decoding is called encryption, so what we really mean here is SSH is secure because it uses an encrypted communication channel. SSH is a secure way of sending communications between two computers.īy ‘secure’, I mean a way of encoding the messages on a client computer such that the only other computer that can decode the messages and understand them is the host. Using SSH to check authentication is a more secure way of authentication than using a password.

I believe this is an important concept to understand for anyone who aspires to work with web technologies.

If your messages weren’t encrypted, then any computer that was listening or any computer that received the messages to pass onwards may be able to see your account number and your password.

Imagine sending your bank details over the internet to buy something online. Whenever two computers communicate over the internet we want to be sure that our messages can’t be intercepted and understood by anyone listening to the messages. Why do we care? Secure communications between computers Typically, the two computers involved are your computer (the ‘client’) and a remote server (the ‘host’). It is a protocol for sharing data between two computers over the internet.Ī protocol is essentially a set of rules that define the language that computers can use to communicate. Note: This is intended as future notes to myself, but I hope you learn something from it too! Photo by Matt Artz on Unsplash What is SSH? We will also look at the benefits of using SSH.

We will look at how an SSH session is actually ‘secure’ and how computers establish and set-up an SSH session in the first place. This article will take a high-level and top-down approach to explain how SSH works and how it is used for securely communicating with remote computers.