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Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

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Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#231
post #213

Wow, I did not realize that SSH did that. Good to know, and it makes sense as a default, because the people who need it need to have it on by default. But I think I'm going to be turning that off, because it's a security measure that doesn't make sense for my particular environment: 1) I'm pretty much never typing secrets into an SSH tunnel; these days if there's a secret I need to transmit over SSH I'm going to be c…

There's no way to know in advance if some leaked cleartext will provide enough information to an attacker to be useful. Attackers profit from making creative use of information they didn't have before.

That said, plenty of people disable the most useful security features of SSH, like verifying host key signatures, with no ill-effects (as far as they know). For the majority of users, using Telnet and unencrypted HTTP would make no difference, as nobody's trying to hack them, and who really cares about privacy anyway?

Did you know SSH has long-standing performance limitations due to its design that need patches to eliminate? It was never intended to be a high-performance tool. If you want really high performance, use Telnet. If you want real security, use SSH with all strong security options enabled plus a server using ContainerSSH with the OAuth2 plugin (SSH's keys are static, which can be captured and reused, which is bad). If you don't care either way, use SSH with the defaults.

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#232
Funny that this comes up today! I was just looking into adding a keyboard monitor to my website (I have a goal of making my 'contact me' page have oddly specific information). I wouldn't show the actual keys, just show a blinking light when there's activity, but I guess the timing really could expose quite a lot of information.

I did add a trackpad monitor though. It shows my raw MacBook trackpad data.

https://varun.ch/contact/

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#233
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with Gemini.

You can absolutely see this pattern in Gemini in 2026. Btw, is the injection of "absolutely" and "in $YEAR" prevalent in other LLMs as well, or is it just in Gemini's dialect?

I've had gemini tell me "We are debugging this problem here in İstanbul" and talking about an istanbul evening, trying to give uplifting or familiar vibes while being creepy.

I think there was a setting about time and location which finally got rid of that behavior.

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"where we might as well save the bandwidth" I come from a world (yesteryear) where a computer had 1KB of RAM (ZX80). I've used links with modems rocking 1200 bps (1200 bits per second). I recall US Robotics modems getting to speeds of 56K - well that was mostly a fib worse than MS doing QA these days. Ooh I could chat with some bloke from Novell on Compuserve. In 1994ish I was asked to look into this fancy new world…

> I've used links with modems rocking 1200 bps Yo, 300 baud, checking in. Do I hear 110? +++ATH0

Ha, same! On a TRS-80 Color, nonetheless. But I think I used four times, because no one else in the country had a BBS at the time (small city in Latin America).

It took a couple of years until it would catch on, and by then 1200 and 2400 bps were already the norm - thankfully!

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#236

> Obviously forking go’s crypto library is a little scary, and I’m gonna have to do some thinking about how to maintain my little patch in a safe way This should really be upstreamed as an option on the ssh library. Its good to default to sending chaff in untrusted environments, but there are plenty of places where we might as well save the bandwidth

"where we might as well save the bandwidth" I come from a world (yesteryear) where a computer had 1KB of RAM (ZX80). I've used links with modems rocking 1200 bps (1200 bits per second). I recall US Robotics modems getting to speeds of 56K - well that was mostly a fib worse than MS doing QA these days. Ooh I could chat with some bloke from Novell on Compuserve. In 1994ish I was asked to look into this fancy new world…

Same year, I tried this cool new "Mosaic" software and thought it was a cool proof of concept, but there was no way this web thing could ever displace gopher

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point they're making is that "I, a seasoned network security and red-team-type person, could have done this in Wireshark without AI assistance" is neither surprising nor interesting. That'd be like saying "I, an emergency room doctor, do not need AI assistance to interpret an EKG" Consider that your expertise is atypical.

Sure, but that is aside from my original point. If somebody: a) Has the knowledge to run tcpdump or similar from the command line b) Has the ambition to document and publish their effort on the internet c) Has the ability identify and patch the target behaviors in code I argue that, had they not run to an LLM, they likely would have solved this problem more efficiently, and would have learned more along the way. Forg…

>I argue that, had they not run to an LLM, they likely would have solved this problem more efficiently

Hard disagree. Asking an LLM is 1000% more efficient than reading docs, lots of which are poorly written and thus dense and time-consuming to wade through.

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#238
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how LLMs influence us, right? The opposite happened to me: I loved using em dashes, but AI ruined it for me.

I still love using emdashes, and people already thought I was a robot! https://xkcd.com/3126/ Soon the Andy 3000 will finally be a reality...

That's a sweet ass—reference

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"where we might as well save the bandwidth" I come from a world (yesteryear) where a computer had 1KB of RAM (ZX80). I've used links with modems rocking 1200 bps (1200 bits per second). I recall US Robotics modems getting to speeds of 56K - well that was mostly a fib worse than MS doing QA these days. Ooh I could chat with some bloke from Novell on Compuserve. In 1994ish I was asked to look into this fancy new world…

Fellow old here, I had several 56k baud modems but even my USR (the best of the bunch) never got more than half way to 56k throughput. Took forever to download shit over BBS...

The real analog copper lines were kind of limited to approx 28K - more or less the nyquist limit. However, the lines at the time were increasingly replaced with digital 64Kbit lines that sampled the analog tone. So, the 56k standard aligned itself to the actual sample times, and that allowed it to reach a 56k bps rate (some time/error tolerance still eats away at your bandwidth)

If you never got more than 24-28k, you likely still had an analog line.

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow old here, I had several 56k baud modems but even my USR (the best of the bunch) never got more than half way to 56k throughput. Took forever to download shit over BBS...

The real analog copper lines were kind of limited to approx 28K - more or less the nyquist limit. However, the lines at the time were increasingly replaced with digital 64Kbit lines that sampled the analog tone. So, the 56k standard aligned itself to the actual sample times, and that allowed it to reach a 56k bps rate (some time/error tolerance still eats away at your bandwidth) If you never got more than 24-28k, you…

Yeah 28k sounds more closer to what I got when things were going well. I also forget if they were tracking in lower case 'k' (x1000) or upper case 'K' (x1024) units/s which obviously has an effect as well.
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