SSH and Mac OS X 10.0.4: a work-around for potential problem
SSH and Mac OS X 10.0.4: a work-around for potential problem
"After updating to 10.0.4 I found I was no longer able to connect to any of our Linux servers using ssh - ssh would always respond with a bad packet length and disconnect before I got chance to login. After scouting the sshd and ssh man pages, I found that ssh (1.5 protocol) uses two ciphers to encrypt/decrypt packets - these are 3des (triple d's) and blowfish (the 2.0 protocol uses 4, but is irrelevant here). From the man page:
"3des is used by default. It is believed to be secure. 3des (triple-des) is an encrypt-decrypt-encrypt triple with three different keys. It is presumably more secure than the des cipher which is no longer fully supported in ssh. Blowfish is a fast block cipher, it appears very secure and is much faster than 3des."
I forced the use of the blowfish cypher by entering the following in Terminal:
<ssh -c blowfish some.host.com>
I am able to now connect to the ssh server. The Linux server is running OpenSSH-2.9p2, while the Mac OS X client is running OpenSSH-2.9p1 (this also happens on a server running ssh-2.5)."
Update: Jason Sims notes: "I have not been able to get my OpenSSH 2.9p2 daemon to accept any logins via password authentication. I had to switch to public key encryption (by creating a public/private key pair on my Mac, then putting my public key into a file on the server). By the way, the 'p' in the release name stands for portable, not preview. The main build is written for OpenBSD, while the builds for other operating systems are called portable releases."
Update: Jeremy Mates suggests a look at these Slashdot items (one and two) for background on a trademark battle between SSH and OpenSSH.