SSH safety

Tom Diehl tdiehl at rogueind.com
Sun Nov 14 07:48:19 UTC 2004


On Sun, 14 Nov 2004, J.L. Coenders wrote:

> Hi,
> I was wondering how safe it is to open the ssh port up to the internet. I am 
> behind a router which is firewalled to block all traffic, unless I open it up 
> and route it to my computer. Is it safe to open ssh up to the internet, so I 
> can run applications of my home computer over the internet?

Depends on how paranoid you are. Every open port creates some risk. Generally
speaking ssh is fairly secure but there have been exploits found in it in the
past. As long as you keep things up2date you should be OK. You can as others
will suggest move the port ssh runs on to a non-standard port which means that
the scripts that run everyday looking for weak passwds and known exploits will
not know where to look. You can also disable root logins via ssh among other
things, depending on your level of paranoia.

HTH,

Tom




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