Report this

What is the reason for this report?

What is SSH?

Published on February 3, 2021
Mark Drake

By Mark Drake

Manager, Developer Education

What is SSH?

Secure Shell — more commonly known as SSH — is a cryptographic network protocol that allows users to securely access one computer from another over an unsecured network.

SSH uses public-key cryptography to authenticate users and machines; a system administrator will add the public key of any user who must access a remote computer to a specific location in its filesystem. On Unix-like systems, authorized public keys are typically stored in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. Any user who presents a private SSH key that matches one of the public keys on the remote machine will be able to access it.

For more educational resources related to SSH, please visit our resources on How To Set Up SSH Keys and How To Use SFTP to Securely Transfer Files with a Remote Server.

Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

Learn more about our products

About the author

Mark Drake
Mark Drake
Author
Manager, Developer Education
See author profile

Former Technical Writer at DigitalOcean. Focused on SysAdmin topics including Debian 11, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Databases, SQL and PostgreSQL.

Still looking for an answer?

Was this helpful?


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Creative CommonsThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Join the Tech Talk
Success! Thank you! Please check your email for further details.

Please complete your information!

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Get started for free

Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*

*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.