Dropbear SSH, a lightweight alternative to OpenSSH
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Dropbear SSH, a lightweight alternative to OpenSSH
1–10 of 110 posts
Re: Dropbear SSH, a lightweight alternative to OpenSSH
#2I recall I've had trouble finding good documentation on the equivalent of OpenSSH features in Dropbear. Stuff like restricting the client IP or disabling port forwarding... lesser-used features like these. It's been a while though.
Re: Dropbear SSH, a lightweight alternative to OpenSSH
#3Very common in embedded devices. This link isn't working at the moment, so here's a link to the actual project: https://matt.ucc.asn.au/dropbear/dropbear.html
Re: Dropbear SSH, a lightweight alternative to OpenSSH
#4Often used with ARM, why is it never used by default on X86/X64 distros? I would think that the "lightweight" alternative would be lean and mean, kind of like Nginx vs Apache.
Re: Dropbear SSH, a lightweight alternative to OpenSSH
#5I recall I've had trouble finding good documentation on the equivalent of OpenSSH features in Dropbear. Stuff like restricting the client IP or disabling port forwarding... lesser-used features like these. It's been a while though.
The general pattern used by most of these "lightweight" implementations of system software is granular compile-time options for every additional bit of functionality.
https://busybox.net is a good example of this.
Re: Dropbear SSH, a lightweight alternative to OpenSSH
#6Often used with ARM, why is it never used by default on X86/X64 distros? I would think that the "lightweight" alternative would be lean and mean, kind of like Nginx vs Apache.
It doesn't do privilege separation and it's had a few security issues (like CVE-2016-7409). I also think that some of the more exotic features are missing.
Re: Dropbear SSH, a lightweight alternative to OpenSSH
#7Often used with ARM, why is it never used by default on X86/X64 distros? I would think that the "lightweight" alternative would be lean and mean, kind of like Nginx vs Apache.
Nginx won because it was faster, simpler and more easily extended, not because it was "lightweight" per se.
In comparison, dropbear doesn't really do anything that ssh doesn't, and lags in a bunch of esoteric features that "most" people don't use but that inevitably some people do. Who wants to use a distro where one's preferred ssh-agent feature or X11 forwarding inexplicably doesn't work?
Dropbear is small and builds cleanly everywhere, so it's what you pick if you're size constrained or just need "an ssh" for your embedded environment and don't want to bother integrating something larger. No one specifically wants it at the command line on their "Linux" system.
Re: Dropbear SSH, a lightweight alternative to OpenSSH
#8I use an ad-free, open-source Android app called SimpleSSHD that implements a Dropbear SSH server. Being able to SSH into your phone and wirelessly perform an incremental rsync backup of all your photos and data is life-changing compared to the hell that is cables and the MTP protocol.
Thank you to all these projects for delivering me from the clutches of MTP, I am indebted.
Re: Dropbear SSH, a lightweight alternative to OpenSSH
#9Dropbear works well for preboot LUKS unlocking with remote servers.
Re: Dropbear SSH, a lightweight alternative to OpenSSH
#10Often used with ARM, why is it never used by default on X86/X64 distros? I would think that the "lightweight" alternative would be lean and mean, kind of like Nginx vs Apache.
I believe Alpine Linux offers it in the installer.