JTA - Telnet/SSH for the JAVA(tm) platform: SSH Plugin

© 1996-2000 Matthias L. Jugel and Marcus Meißner

Version 2.0 / Java 2 and 1.1.x
Available under GNU General Public License

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Secure Shell Plugin

Today it is advicable to use secure communications as public networks, like the Internet are not secure. The secure shell (SSH) plugin provides an easy to use, but secure way to log into a remote host. To use this plugin make sure your remote host has a secure shell server running. It may be used as a replacement for the Telnet plugin, which does no encryption!

This implementation of SSH provides IDEA, Blowfish and RSA/PKCS#1 encryption and was originally written in 1998 by Cedric Gourio. He used a part of the old Java Telnet Applet to write his Java SSH client and so the code was similar to our old applet.

There are other implementations of ssh for Java available, but those packages implement the whole ssh protocol and all features which makes the packages very big. We tried to keep our implementation to a minimum for easier download.

You can configure the plugin using the following properties:
(there will be configurable parts, but these are not yet implemented!)

Security Note

The applet is suspectible to the man-in-the-middle attacks published by Security Portal. We cannot avoid this. We can't even use the RSA based host authorization, since the applet itself is downloaded from the remote host, may not keep local state and might be modified by the man-in-the-middle.

The only way to guard against applet modification would be having it signed with a trust certificate. This is too expensive both money- and timewise for us.

So there is encryption, but it only guards against normal packetsniffing attacks.

Property Documentation
Additional Programmer Documentation is available:
 
de.mud.jta.plugin.SSH
This is the programmer documentation for the plugin. Use it as an example if you want to write your own back end plugins.
de.mud.jta.event
This plugins uses some of the events and listeners described here.
Copyright 1996-2000 Matthias L. Jugel, Marcus Meißner
$Id: SSH.html 500 2005-10-07 09:15:07Z leo $