I’ve done research and I’m not sure if got the idea correctly. Is SSH used to remotely access the computers with encryption? Is it like how TeamViewer (connecting a remote computer) works?
In: Technology
> Is SSH used to remotely access the computers with encryption?
Pretty much. You can do more things with it than just that, but this is the main thing it’s used for.
SSH is a “tunneling” protocol. That is, it’s a specific way of creating, sending, and reading encrypted communications designed to be sent though insecure channels, such as the Internet.
The Internet itself works like a chain of people passing buckets down a line. When you send data to somewhere else on the Internet (like you might do when, say, logging into Reddit), you are implicitly relying on many, possibly dozens of computers to take your login request and hand it down the chain, one-by-one, until it gets to Reddit’s servers. Along the way, any one of those bucket-passers can inspect your message. If you wrote it in plain language, now they know your login details!
If you want to prevent it from being read by unauthorized eyes, you need to scramble your message using some kind of cipher. There are many, many ways to do this, each with a different set of costs and benefits. You are also going to need a way to ensure that the other computer you’re sending data to knows you are going to do this, and knows how to read it when it gets to them. There are also many, many ways to do this. SSH is just one of these ways, optimized specifically for the use case of logging into computers remotely.
Also, no, it’s not quite like TeamViewer. In almost all implementations of SSH, you get a command line terminal. That’s it. You don’t see the desktop of the remote machine. I believe projects exist that *do* show you the remote computer’s screen by tunneling all the data through an SSH connection, but those are almost never what anyone means when they talk about SSH unless they specify.
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