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Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

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Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#31

Post by blibble »

retrac wrote: post #26
blibble wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure that's right... for interactive use, compared to rendering to the display and pushing the packet out the crypto overhead is going to be minuscule

Once you have authenticated each other and agree to a nice symmetric cipher and exchange the keys for that, yes. Bytes, even kilobytes per second. But note the "once you have authenticated". Public key crypto is brutal number crunching and takes minutes to hours on systems of the 80s, and some noticeable seconds even in the late 90s. I think that's why something like RSA-4096 was not just universally adopted 30 years…

even the crappiest laptop CPU can do 10000 x 4096-bit RSA signature verifications per second

my 2014 laptop (on battery, no hardware acceleration):

                      sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
    rsa 4096 bits 0.006200s 0.000096s    161.3  10468.9
(not to mention everyone's using ec these days, which is quite a bit faster)

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#33

Post by Someone »

grishka wrote: post #10
tambourine_man wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here for this exact comment. The artwork is spot on. That, by itself alone, would have been amazing. I don't miss the lack of memory protection of classic Mac OS, but I do miss everything else.

Didn't last Mac OS 9 versions have memory protection? I mean there's a reason it's hard to run 9.2 on an emulator — it requires a working MMU.

It has preemptive multitasking for compute-only tasks (the MultiProcessing library. See http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/tec...)

I also think the OS, technically, was preemptive multitasking, but ran all ‘normal’ code in a single preemptive task (https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.mac.programmer.help/c/f...)

I also vaguely remember the kernel had some memory protection enabled.

Of course, almost none of that mattered for typical user-space programs.

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#34

Post by im_down_w_otp »

Lammy wrote: post #27
_qbjt wrote: post #22

Oh wow, thank you for this. :) I was just restoring an iMac G3, the Flower Power edition, and ran into more trouble than I expected trying to transfer data via a USB flash drive. Filesystems that Mac OS 9 should support were either not mounting properly or causing errors during file transfer when formatted on a modern Apple or Linux system (exFAT was the only one I could get to work for some reason). I’ve been casual…

> some sort of NAS solution that would be compatible with older versions of Mac OS http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/ :)

You have to run the 2.x series to interoperate with older "classic" Macs. Nearly everything these days packages the 3.x series and thus only works with more recent OS X clients.

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#35

Post by setpatchaddress »

blibble wrote: post #31
retrac wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you have authenticated each other and agree to a nice symmetric cipher and exchange the keys for that, yes. Bytes, even kilobytes per second. But note the "once you have authenticated". Public key crypto is brutal number crunching and takes minutes to hours on systems of the 80s, and some noticeable seconds even in the late 90s. I think that's why something like RSA-4096 was not just universally adopted 30 years…

even the crappiest laptop CPU can do 10000 x 4096-bit RSA signature verifications per second my 2014 laptop (on battery, no hardware acceleration): sign verify sign/s verify/s rsa 4096 bits 0.006200s 0.000096s 161.3 10468.9 (not to mention everyone's using ec these days, which is quite a bit faster)

The 68k Macs are < 60MHz and the early PowerPCs were not a lot faster. Your 2014 laptop will run circles around them doing just about anything.

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#36

Post by tubularalloy »

blibble wrote: post #31
retrac wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you have authenticated each other and agree to a nice symmetric cipher and exchange the keys for that, yes. Bytes, even kilobytes per second. But note the "once you have authenticated". Public key crypto is brutal number crunching and takes minutes to hours on systems of the 80s, and some noticeable seconds even in the late 90s. I think that's why something like RSA-4096 was not just universally adopted 30 years…

even the crappiest laptop CPU can do 10000 x 4096-bit RSA signature verifications per second my 2014 laptop (on battery, no hardware acceleration): sign verify sign/s verify/s rsa 4096 bits 0.006200s 0.000096s 161.3 10468.9 (not to mention everyone's using ec these days, which is quite a bit faster)

It just occurred to me while reading this comment that people born after Intel CPUs mostly leveled out perfwise are probably peers now. That realization came hard, it came fast, and I wasn’t ready to live with that knowledge by a long shot.

It was a long, long road to your 2014 laptop, friend. There was a time when division was a luxury, and desperate folk offered their firstborn for forbidden tricks to compute inverse square root. Elliptic curve, you say? You mean floating point math? Whoo-ee!

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#37

Post by _xy8h »

blibble wrote: post #31
retrac wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you have authenticated each other and agree to a nice symmetric cipher and exchange the keys for that, yes. Bytes, even kilobytes per second. But note the "once you have authenticated". Public key crypto is brutal number crunching and takes minutes to hours on systems of the 80s, and some noticeable seconds even in the late 90s. I think that's why something like RSA-4096 was not just universally adopted 30 years…

even the crappiest laptop CPU can do 10000 x 4096-bit RSA signature verifications per second my 2014 laptop (on battery, no hardware acceleration): sign verify sign/s verify/s rsa 4096 bits 0.006200s 0.000096s 161.3 10468.9 (not to mention everyone's using ec these days, which is quite a bit faster)

Power7+ came out in 2012 which was the first gen of Power CPUs to include AES acceleration. [1]

The most powerful Power Macs with non Intel CPUs were discontinued in 2006. (G5, released 2003.) [2]

Your laptop from 2014 was already running at LEAST a 64bit CPU and likely has AES instructions as they were introduced in 2010 [3]

So even if your laptop from 2014 onward didn't include AES instructions like some Intel Atom/Celeron/Pentium models... (Acer C720P Chromebook, for example came out in 2014 and has a Intel Celeron 2955U [4] and [5]) It was still an architecture that is/was ELEVEN YEARS NEWER. A Celeron 2955U is roughly equivalent in performance to a Core 2 Duo E4700 or an AMD Athlon 64 x2 5200+ ... which is still quite ahead of a PowerMac G5. [6] and [7]

TLDR: Time marches on and along with cpu improvements come instructions and other benefits not immediately visible to the end user.

Try using your old 2003-era system to generate keys again and tell us how fun it is. Bonus if you try it on a Pre-2000 era Performa Mac as a user typically had with SystemOS 7, 8 and 9. Those ran at 16 to 66mhz. [8]

For reference, SystemOS 7 came out in 1991. [9] OS8 came out in 1997. [10] And OS9 came out in 1999. [11]

The CPUs inside the Performa Macs running System 7, OS8 and OS9, at best, can be compared to the 486s on the Intel side. Not even Pentium level. This places the architecture at LEAST a dozen architecture generations behind what you're generating keys on. This means if the CPUs we're looking at here were aged up, your laptop is starting first or second grade while the actual CPUs of the time are now finishing their masters' degrees with a kid or two on the way.

Rather than naively using your extremely modern in comparison 'crappy laptop' cpu as a reference point, perhaps you should use something more typical from the time these OSes were considered relevant.

TLDR to the TLDR: Get off my lawn.

[1] https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G5

[3] https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/article...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Acer-C720P-2666-Chromebook-11-6-Inch-...

[5] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/75608/i...

[6] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Celeron-2955U-vs-...

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PowerMac...

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Performa

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_8

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_9

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#38

Post by im_down_w_otp »

tikwidd wrote: post #30
_qbjt wrote: post #22

Oh wow, thank you for this. :) I was just restoring an iMac G3, the Flower Power edition, and ran into more trouble than I expected trying to transfer data via a USB flash drive. Filesystems that Mac OS 9 should support were either not mounting properly or causing errors during file transfer when formatted on a modern Apple or Linux system (exFAT was the only one I could get to work for some reason). I’ve been casual…

For classic macs with ethernet ports, the simplest method I have found is to host a basic FTP server on another computer (e.g. you can set one up easily enough on a Raspberry Pi) and use an Ftp client such as Fetch on the mac side. I use this method to get files to and from my LC III, which also functions as a bridge baby to the really old macs via the Appletalk serial port.

This is what I do, and it works pretty well if a little cumbersome at times. I have a little museum I've built in my office during the pandemic that consists of:

- SE/30

- Docked Duo 280c

- 7100/80

- PowerComputing PT Pro 250

- NeXT TurboStation

My primary Linux workstation is where I browse for old software and download it, then I get at stuff from the vintage Macs via FTP using either Interarchy or Fetch.

Rather than run a bunch of Ethernet cables all over the place I put little Ethernet to Wifi bridge adapters on them. Works great.

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#39

Post by blibble »

_xy8h wrote: post #37
blibble wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even the crappiest laptop CPU can do 10000 x 4096-bit RSA signature verifications per second my 2014 laptop (on battery, no hardware acceleration): sign verify sign/s verify/s rsa 4096 bits 0.006200s 0.000096s 161.3 10468.9 (not to mention everyone's using ec these days, which is quite a bit faster)

Power7+ came out in 2012 which was the first gen of Power CPUs to include AES acceleration. [1] The most powerful Power Macs with non Intel CPUs were discontinued in 2006. (G5, released 2003.) [2] Your laptop from 2014 was already running at LEAST a 64bit CPU and likely has AES instructions as they were introduced in 2010 [3] So even if your laptop from 2014 onward didn't include AES instructions like some Intel Atom…

> Your laptop from 2014 was already running at LEAST a 64bit CPU and likely has AES instructions as they were introduced in 2010 [3]

I'm totally sure the RSA operations are using the AES instructions

> Try using your old 2003-era system to generate keys again and tell us how fun it is.

generating (fresh) rsa keys? you don't do that on connection to a SSH server

as for what actually happens on connect, 2004 laptop: 33 signatures/second and 2200 verifications/second (+DH/ECDH)

the RSA operation (verifying the server's host key) took a total of 0.0005s

even my raspberry pi 1 can do 240 4096-bit verifications/s and several thousand ECDH's/second

and I have yet to see a SSH server with 4096-bit host keys

tldr: even old computers are fast (and data > supposition)

Re: Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

#40

Post by _xy8h »

blibble wrote: post #39
_xy8h wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power7+ came out in 2012 which was the first gen of Power CPUs to include AES acceleration. [1] The most powerful Power Macs with non Intel CPUs were discontinued in 2006. (G5, released 2003.) [2] Your laptop from 2014 was already running at LEAST a 64bit CPU and likely has AES instructions as they were introduced in 2010 [3] So even if your laptop from 2014 onward didn't include AES instructions like some Intel Atom…

> Your laptop from 2014 was already running at LEAST a 64bit CPU and likely has AES instructions as they were introduced in 2010 [3] I'm totally sure the RSA operations are using the AES instructions > Try using your old 2003-era system to generate keys again and tell us how fun it is. generating (fresh) rsa keys? you don't do that on connection to a SSH server as for what actually happens on connect, 2004 laptop: 33…

TLDR: You're not using era appropriate examples.

I told you to get off my lawn.

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