What is SSH? A basic description
Secure Shell (SSH) was intended and designed to afford the greatest protection when remotely accessing another host over the network. It encrypts the network exchange by providing better authentication facilities as well as features such as Secure Copy (SCP), Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), X session forwarding, and port forwarding to increase the security of other insecure protocols. Various types of encryption are available, ranging from 512-bit encryption to as high as 32768 bits, inclusive of ciphers, like Blowfish, Triple DES, CAST-128, Advanced Encryption Scheme (AES), and ARCFOUR. Higher-bit encryption configurations come at a cost of greater network bandwidth use. Secure Shell