Secure Shell facts for kids
Secure Shell (SSH) is a special way for computers to talk to each other over the Internet in a very safe way. It's mostly used to let people log into other computers and give them commands, almost like being right there. SSH makes sure that all the information shared between two computers stays private and secure.
It's used a lot on computers that run Linux, Mac and Unix operating systems. You can think of SSH as a much safer version of older ways to connect, like Telnet. It's much harder for someone to secretly watch or "hack" your connection when you use SSH.
How SSH Keeps Things Secret
SSH uses a clever trick with digital "keys" to keep your information safe. Imagine you have a special lock and two parts of a key:
- One part is your private key. You keep this secret and never share it.
- The other part is your public key. You can share this with anyone.
These two parts are connected by math. When you want to send a message to another computer, your computer uses your private key and the other computer's public key to scramble the message. This scrambling is so clever that only the other computer, using its own private key and your public key, can unscramble and read the message. This means that if someone tries to snoop on your connection, they won't be able to understand your messages without both parts of the keys.
Why SSH Was Created
SSH was invented in 1995 by a person named Tatu Ylönen. He created it because the older ways of connecting to computers, like rlogin, Telnet, and rsh, were not very safe. They didn't protect information well, making it easy for others to see what you were doing. SSH was designed to fix these problems and provide a much more secure way to work with computers from a distance.
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See also
In Spanish: Secure Shell para niños
