Cipher 'none'

[Damien Miller]

On Fri, 13 Oct 2000, Edward Avis wrote:

> By making a one-line change it is possible to enable the cipher 'none'
> in openssh.  But you still have to ask for it explicitly, either by
> adding it to /etc/ssh/ssh_config or by giving the '-c none' option to
> ssh.
> 
> I think that this 'feature' should be turned back on, because for slow
> machines or large file transfers, using encryption slows things down a
> lot.  This means that you have to resort to rcp or ftp to get
> things working at a reasonable speed, which is a bad habit for the users
> to get into.

It is a bad habit to have unencrypted data on your network full stop :)

Seriously, some of the ciphers offered by SSH2 are pretty fast. These
are the times it took to scp a 100Mb file to /dev/null via ssh2 over
localhost:

P166

3des-cbc: 232 sec 431kbps
blowfish-cbc: 90 sec 1.1Mbps
arcfour: 71 sec 1.4Mbps

P3/700

3des-cbc: 47 sec 2.1Mbps
blowfish-cbc: 18 sec, 5.5Mbps
cast128-cbc: 18 sec, 5.5Mbps
arcfour: 12 sec 8.3Mbps

-d

-- 
| ``The power of accurate observation is  | Damien Miller <djm at mindrot.org>
| commonly called cynicism by those who   | @Work <djm at ibs.com.au>
| have not got it'' - George Bernard Shaw | http://www.mindrot.org