Alsina González
Specialist journalist and researcher
Although it may seem to us that it is now when communications through technological means should be more secure than before, counting on the fact that there has been a kind of “age of innocence” of the Internet, the truth is that at all times the danger has existed of someone reading our messages or virtually breaking into our computers.
That is why, in one way or another, more or less efforts have always been made to ensure that communications are secure and, for this, a series of protocols and technologies have been created that help us guarantee integrity and confidentiality. .
The SSL and the TLS are, respectively, the original and the successor, of a cryptographic protocol used to secure communications in telematic networks, mainly the Internet.
What SSL did (Secure Sockets Layer) and continues to do TLS (Transport Layer Security) more efficiently, is to encrypt communications through the use of cryptography in various online services, such as email or the web.
It constitutes an Internet standard, elaborated, maintained and recognized by the technical management organizations of the network of networks, with which something is universal, independent of the manufacturer and whose use is facilitated by any solution developer who works creating software and services in Internet.
The history of both protocols dates back to the mid-1990s, when SSL 2.0 came into use (version 1.0 never became generally available).
TLS 1.0 is an improved reimplementation of SSL 3.0, with enough differences to make the two incompatible with each other.
The differences between TLS and SSL is that the former improves the latter by correcting security vulnerabilities that have been found in SSL, and that in TLS the client is authenticated, while in SSL it is not.
This last detail is very important, since it makes it possible to ensure that, in a “conversation” between programs and services over the Internet, both the client and the server are who they say they are, and that no one is “listening” to the communications. half.
On the other hand, in SSL, someone could intercept the communications and impersonate the client, since there was no verification of the client’s identity, it was only verified in the case of the server.
SSH (Secure Shell) is a program that allows us to communicate, through a command line, with a remote server in a secure way
And it does so, as in the previous case, based on cryptography to encrypt the communications exchanged with the server, so that no one can extract the information from the packets that cross between them.
It is a tool present in the vast majority of operating systems today, since it allows remote and simplified administration of a server.
Usually, we have tools that work on the web, providing a graphical environment, but these are slow and depend, for their execution, on various elements running on the server, such as a web server.
On the other hand, SSH only needs its own server, very simple and that occupies few resources, and does not even require a graphical environment, with which we can use it in the simplest environments.
The fact that it is a command line environment means that we must know the list of commands that the operating system of the computer to which we connect to accepts.
The system is the same as the old MS-DOS for PC home computers before the arrival of Windows, and replaces Telnet, another program that used to do the same thing, but did not include the added security of cryptography for communications.
Photo: Fotolia. sasha85ru
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