SSH Security Solution for Linux on IBM Mainframes

Oct 15, 2008

Britta Wuelfing

Finnish company SSH Communications Security has expanded its product family SSH Tectia with a security software package for Linux running on IBM System z mainframes.

Behind SSH Communications Security is Tatu Ylönen, creator of the Secure Shell (SSH) network protocol that led to development of the OpenSSH open source project. The company sells his proprietary variant of OpenSSH under the name SSH Tectia with the matching service and support. The company has experienced increasing demand among Linux and IBM mainframe users, therefore released a version specific to this environment. CEO George Adams claims that Linux on IBM System z "is increasingly being used as an OS for virtualized IT environments," thereby identifying the target group and promising a fully supported communications security solution for complex multiplatform environments.

The company promotes the SSH Tectia Server for IBM z/OS as a scalable all-in-one security solution. The product provides data encryption, internal and external data transfers, tunneling application connections and system administration. The software is based on the third generation of the Secure Shell protocol (SSH G3), which promises higher performance and faster throughput via multithreading, among other things. To allow optimal performance, the product relies on the hardware crypto accelerator already integrated on the IBM mainframe. Additional functionality of the software includes secure host-based authentication, file transfers and TN3270 tunneling. Also included are command line tools for secure remote execution. SSH Tectia Server is available immediately; extensive information about the functionality is in the release notes.

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