jasun's blog

The OpenSSH project turns five

Here is the announcement:

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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 re-execution.

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.

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Five years already? That was a bit of a shock. It just goes to show how quickly time goes. I've been using OpenSSH since the start, firstly with OpenBSD and then moving over to using it on Linux. A lot has been done with it, hopefully there is more to come. Well done to all those concerned.