Design and Implementation of a Mobile SSH Protocol

SSH (secure shell) is a very popular secure communication application. Users can remotely login to servers through SSH channels with security protection. However, since the SSH protocol lacks mobility management support, an SSH session can be easily broken while the wireless device roams around. In this paper, we propose a mobile SSH protocol which employs an application-layer handover mechanism. We have implemented the proposed SSH protocol in OpenSSH and Putty. With the proposed protocol, the mobile users can switch from one wireless network to another without terminating their SSH sessions. This paper presents the design of the proposed mobile SSH protocol and the preliminary experimental results.