28 Sep 04

The OpenSSH project turns five years old

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Five years ago, in late September 1999, the OpenSSH project was started.

It began with an audit, cleanup and update of the last free version

of Tatu Ylonen’s legacy ssh-1.2.12 code. The project quickly gathered

pace, attracting a portability effort and, in early 2000, an independent

implementation of version 2 of the SSH protocol. Since then, OpenSSH

has led in the implementation of proactive security techniques such as

privilege separation & auto-reexecution.

The free software community were rapid adopters of OpenSSH, with most

free operating systems shipping OpenSSH within its first year of

existence. Over the last five years OpenSSH has become the most widely

used SSH protocol implementation (by a large margin) and has been

included in products from major vendors including IBM, Apple, HP, Sun,

Cisco and NetScreen. Today, OpenSSH runs on everything from mobile

phones to Cray supercomputers.

In providing a free, popular and easy to use secure login and command

execution protocol OpenSSH has been instrumental in speeding the

deprecation of insecure protocols like telnet and rlogin.

The OpenSSH team would like to thank all those who have supported the

project over the last five years, including individuals and vendors who

have donated funds or hardware. An extra special thanks to those who

have reported bugs or sent patches to the project.

OpenSSH is brought to you by Markus Friedl, Niels Provos, Theo de Raadt,

Kevin Steves, Damien Miller, Ben Lindstrom, Darren Tucker and Tim Rice.

http://www.openssh.com/