Why use the Secure Shell Protocol?
The secure shell protocol prevents network eavesdropping by unscrupulous individuals in search of userids and passwords to gain unauthorized access to systems. Because telnet, rlogin, and ftp present passwords “in the clear” over a non-secure network, they are vulnerable to this form of eavesdropping. The secure shell protocol encrypts (via public key encryption) userid and password interchange between two machines and then encrypts (via faster, symmetric encryption algorithms) the network traffic between the two machines. Both the password exchange and the data passing between the two machines is encrypted with strong encryption.
