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Comment by hestefisk | Hacker News Reader

Very timely with an alternative. There’s a huge monoculture risk with everyone using OpenSSH (although I love it).

I believe there are several implementations built off the golang implementation (https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/crypto/ssh) of SSH protocol such as Teleport (https://github.com/gravitational/teleport/)

I'm not familiar with additional approaches, and Teleport is a very different approach than tinyssh, focused on more features and controls than regular SSH. I imagine there are several other good options using the golang libs, or in theory someone could build their own limited implementation as an alternative.

And full disclosure, I work for Teleport, but my comments are my own.

However, it does require an sftp and scp binary from OpenSSH, if these features are to be used.

The latest scp clients use the sftp server, but older implementations will need both to be accessible.

For a secure/minimal set I'd just avoid sftp and it's client-commanded resource management. Just use plain scp, the protocol is very simple.

Funnily enough OpenSSH are switching scp to use the SFTP protocol https://www.openssh.com/txt/release-8.8

You don't even need scp if you go for minimalism. ssh and cat work fine (add tar on top for multiple file transfer).

While it is good to have another alternative, I think Dropbear SSH[1] is also being used very widely.

[1] https://matt.ucc.asn.au/dropbear/dropbear.html

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