PhxBUG - Phoenix BSD User Group

I took a look at the latest Internet SSH scan from November 2005 and thought it was generally interesting. Like always, OpenSSH severely dominates the SSH usage base on public systems. There's a few other bits of interest to be learned from the survey as well.

First thing I notice is the outrageously small amount of usage enjoyed by the commercial SSH.com implementation. Granted, OpenSSH has continuously taken a bite out of their deployment base since its release, but it's bad now -- something to the tune of only 3 or 4 percent of the overall SSH server base sampled. Ironically, a lot of SSH.com customers do defend SSH.com's Tectia product pretty well, and claim that it is a beloved SSH implementation. Maybe this would be better evidenced if a survey of LAN usage was possible, but the Internet certainly doesn't portray this.

Second thing that struck me was the amount of use that SSHv1 is still seeing compared to SSHv2. If I interpret the graph correctly, an overwhelming number of systems still support backward compatibility with SSHv1 in their SSH implementations rather than offering only SSHv2. I say while this is good for strictly compatibility reasons, it isn't the best thing for security assurance - I personally disable SSHv1 on my SSH servers and provide only SSHv2 compatibility. Yes, you can specify in your SSH client to only use v2 to connect, but I figure better to eliminate the weaker protocol altogether than leave a possibility of having sessions use version 1 of the protocol.