Knowing when to fold ( i.e. SSH is better than Telnet )

John Roach — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:08:45 +0000

You have probably seen my previous post on connecting to Telnet through PHP although it was a novel idea I have just learned that (from a Novell site. No pun intended.) Telnet is very insecure!! To make things clearer Telnet usually creates connections as below;

Up here you can see a hacker can sniff the client-server connection and actually steal the user name and password sent by client. This really won’t do since if someone can spoof/hack/attack our embedded system which we will be adding to home appliances things may go awry. i.e. you will start seeing automated vacuum cleaners attacking your cat. ( Statistics show that H4X0Rz hate cats. )

Hence we can clearly see we need another way for the server and client to talk to each other. After some short Googling I am thinking of using SSH which is native to Linux/Unix based systems. Where the connection will be as below ;

As you can see the SSH encryption creates a safer environment for the client and the server plus any DNS attacks and eavesdropping is clearly impossible. (if not probable.)

Henceforth a new PHP and Python (this time I will write the server+client in Python) shall be written. Please expect updates.

John Roach » php ssh connection

Knowing when to fold ( i.e. SSH is better than Telnet )