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openssh
openssh-portable
C2015–2026
openssh / openssh-portable

openssh-portable

Portable OpenSSH

64Distinct people
73Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
4.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Portable OpenSSH

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 6:36:16 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year73 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-07-22 02:59:34 UTC to 2026-10-10 07:48:53 UTC.

051015202015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 1 submissions, 7 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 4 submissions, 6 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 0 submissions, 9 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 18 mentions; 0 submissions, 18 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC817
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1046
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC909
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC18018
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Portable OpenSSH OpenSSH is a complete implementation of the SSH protocol (version 2) for secure remote login, command execution and file transfer. It includes a client ssh and server sshd, file transfer utilities scp and sftp as well as tools for key generation (ssh-keygen), run-time key storage (ssh-agent) and a number of supporting programs. This is a port of OpenBSD's OpenSSH to most Unix-like operating systems, including Linux, OS X and Cygwin. Portable OpenSSH polyfills OpenBSD APIs that are not available elsewhere, adds sshd sandboxing for more operating systems and includes support for OS-native authentication and auditing (e.g. using PAM). Documentation The official documentation for OpenSSH are the man pages for each tool: ssh(1) sshd(8) ssh-keygen(1) ssh-agent(1) scp(1) sftp(1) ssh-keyscan(8) sftp-server(8) Stable Releases Stable release tarballs are available from a number of download mirrors. We recommend the use of a stable release for most users. Please read the release notes for details of recent changes and potential incompatibilities. Building Portable OpenSSH Dependencies Portable OpenSSH is built using autoconf and make. It requires a working C compiler, standard library and headers. libcrypto from one of LibreSSL, OpenSSL, AWS-LC or BoringSSL may also be used. OpenSSH may be built without any of these, but the resulting binaries will have only a subset of the cryptographic algorithms normally available. zlib is optional; without it transport compression is not supported. FIDO security token support needs libfido2 and its dependencies and will be enabled automatically if they are found. In addition, certain platforms and build-time options may require additional dependencies; see README.platform for details about your platform. Building a release Release tarballs and release branches in git include a pre-built copy of the configure script and may be built using: tar zxvf openssh-X.YpZ.tar.gz cd openssh ./configure # [options] make && make tests See the Build-time Customisation section below for configure options. If you plan on installing OpenSSH to your system, then you will usually want to specify destination paths. Building from git If building from the git master branch, you'll need autoconf installed to build the configure script. The following commands will check out and build portable OpenSSH from git: git clone https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable # or https://anongit.mindrot.org/openssh.git cd openssh-portable autoreconf ./configure make && make tests Build-time Customisation There are many build-time customisation options available. All Autoconf destination path flags (e.g. --prefix) are supported (and are usually required if you want to install OpenSSH). For a full list of available flags, run ./configure --help but a few of the more frequently-used ones are described below. Some of these flags will require additional libraries and/or headers be installed. Flag Meaning --with-pam Enable PAM support. OpenPAM, Linux PAM and Solaris PAM are supported. --with-libedit Enable libedit support for sftp. --with-kerberos5 Enable Kerberos/GSSAPI support. Both Heimdal and MIT Kerberos implementations are supported. --with-selinux Enable SELinux support. Development Portable OpenSSH development is discussed on the openssh-unix-dev mailing list (archive mirror). Bugs and feature requests are tracked on our Bugzilla. Reporting bugs Non-security bugs may be reported to the developers via Bugzilla or via the mailing list above. Security bugs should be reported to openssh@openssh.com.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

6 sources
Mostly correct. The majority of work in both is currently done by Damien and myself, who work on both. There are a couple of people who have done significant work on OpenBSD's ssh (eg Markus, Theo) and various OpenBSD folks who add a feature or fix a bug and move on. There is one person who currently works exclusively on -Portable (Tim Rice, who is still around although not very active these days) and at least one other in the past (Andre Lucas, who wrote the multi-platform login recording code). You can see the current set here: https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/blob/master/.git...
In OpenSSH 10.6
If I understand the code correctly, OpenSSH only injects delays and chaff when you're actively typing data through an interactive session directly to the ssh client itself (i.e. it's reading your key strokes from the TTY, as opposed to keystrokes being sent as opaque data over the X11 channel). There would be no disruption to X11 forwarding while you're not actively typing, and even then there's no delay if it can bundle key presses with non-interactive data. See https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/blob/088ca00/cli... For a full desktop session, X11 over TCP should be much faster just because each X11 client app has it's own TCP connection, whereas for SSH X11 forwarding every app is tunneled over a single TCP connection.
In Sharing an X11 Server Across Hosts with FamilyWild
It's very difficult to reason about, for instance compare the OpenSSH sshd sandbox implementations. https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/blob/master/sshd... https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/blob/master/sand... https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/blob/master/sand... https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/blob/master/sand... w/ Capsicum, beyond faffing around with some file descriptors, it's unclear what security cap_enter() adds: https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/blob/master/sand...
In FreeBSD Capsicum vs. Linux Seccomp Process Sandboxing

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