Security is becoming an ever-bigger issue as the world continues to increase its reliance upon digital information.

Remote access to information is in higher demand as telecommuting increases. It’s also very convenient to be able to manage your network from home, especially when your pager alerts you that mail is down at 3 am.

Traditional methods of remote access include Telnet and the “r services” (rsh, rlogin, and rexec). These are solid, reliable tools when you’re inside your firewall, but they are inherently insecure because traffic generated by these programs is not encrypted. Anyone who can see the traffic on the network can see your data. Sadly enough, this includes any user names and passwords that are sent.

The r services are a slightly safer step. Your data is still not encrypted and can be seen on the network, but only specific machines can connect, based upon a list of trusted hosts in your .rhosts file. As has been proven over the years, IP based authentication is not reliable because addresses can be spoofed to make a machine believe that one machine is really another. Network-address translation (also called IP masquerading) is another problem since every machine behind the network translation device appears as the same machine to the Internet.

The secure shell protocol (SSH) is one way to provide remote access without giving your information to anyone who might be watching. SSH provides a way to log in to another computer, like rsh or telnet, while encrypting all the information that is exchanged between two computers. Be advised that SSH is not the end of the solution. SSH is a very good place to start, but it doesn’t replace other security measures. Firewalls and packet filters can help prevent spoofing. Kerberos, S/Key, and other authentication systems can be used to further augment the end-to-end encryption provided by SSH.

SSH is available for almost any platform, either client or server. F-Secure and SSH Communications Security have versions for most platforms. There is also an effort to develop a free, open source implementation of the SSH v2 protocol. Due to licensing restrictions in the most readily available version of SSH, most versions of Linux do not ship with it.

What is Putty SSH Client?

PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. PuTTY is open source software that is available with source code and is developed and supported by a group of volunteers.

Why choose Putty instead of other Linux software?

The strength of Putty lies in its enormous usability. There is no administrator on this planet who does not use it actively and is not used to it. Everything is arranged exactly as it should be and everyone knows where it is. An additional plus is its reliability and exclusive set of features.

How to install?

In Ubuntu / Lubuntu linux if fairly easy just two commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install puttyCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

What about uninstall?

Yet again easy….

sudo apt-get remove puttyCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

Here is a 60 second tutorial on how to install and find putty in your machine: