HPNSSH: Based on Portable OpenSSH

Starting with version HPN17v0 there will be significant changes to the naming convention used for executables and installation locations. The last version that does not include these changes is HPN16v1 corresponding to the HPN-8_8_P1 tag on the master branch.

HPNSSH is a variant of OpenSSH. It a complete implementation of the SSH protocol (version 2) for secure remote login, command execution and file transfer. It includes a client hpnssh and server hpnsshd, file transfer utilities hpnscp and hpnsftp as well as tools for key generation (hpnssh-keygen), run-time key storage (hpnssh-agent) and a number of supporting programs. It includes numerous performance and functionality enhancements focused on high performance networks and computing envrironments. Complete information can be found in the HPN-README file.

It is fully compatible with all compliant implementations of the SSH protocol and OpenSSH in particular.

This version of HPNSSH is significant departure in terms of naming executables and installation locations. Specifically, all executables are now prefixed with hpn. So ssh becomes hpnssh and scp is now hpnscp. Configuation files and host keys can now be found in /etc/hpnssh. By default hpnsshd now runs on port 2222 but this is configurable. This change was made in order to prevent installations of hpnssh, particularly from package distributions, from interfering with default installations of OpenSSH. HPNSSH is backwards compatible with all versions of OpenSSH including configuration files, keys, and run time options. Additionally, the client will, by default attempt to connect to port 2222 but will automatically fall back to port 22. This is also user configurable.

HPNSSH is based on OpenSSH portable. This is a port of OpenBSD's OpenSSH to most Unix-like operating systems, including Linux, OS X and Cygwin. Portable OpenSSH polyfills OpenBSD APIs that are not available elsewhere, adds sshd sandboxing for more operating systems and includes support for OS-native authentication and auditing (e.g. using PAM).

This document will be changing over time to reflect new changes and features. This document is built off of the OpenSSH README.md

Documentation

The official documentation for OpenSSH are the man pages for each tool.

• ssh(1)
• sshd(8)
• ssh-keygen(1)
• ssh-agent(1)
• scp(1)
• sftp(1)
• ssh-keyscan(8)
• sftp-server(8)

All options in OpenSSH are respected by HPN-SSH. The man pages for HPN-SSH tools are the same as the name of the tool.

Building HPNSSH

Detailed step by step instructions can be found at https://psc.edu/hpn-ssh-home/

Dependencies

HPNSSH is built using autoconf and make. It requires a working C compiler, standard library and headers.

libcrypto from either LibreSSL or OpenSSL may also be used. OpenSSH may be built without either of these, but the resulting binaries will have only a subset of the cryptographic algorithms normally available.

zlib is optional; without it transport compression is not supported.

FIDO security token support needs libfido2 and its dependencies and will be enabled automatically if they are found.

In addition, certain platforms and build-time options may require additional dependencies; see README.platform for details about your platform.

Building a release

Releases include a pre-built copy of the configure script and may be built using:

tar zxvf hpnssh-X.YpZ.tar.gz
cd hpn-ssh
autoreconf -f -i
./configure # [options]
make && make tests

See the Build-time Customisation section below for configure options. If you plan on installing OpenSSH to your system, then you will usually want to specify destination paths.

Building from git

If building from git, you'll need autoconf installed to build the configure script. The following commands will check out and build portable OpenSSH from git:

git clone https://github.com/rapier1/hpn-ssh
cd hpn-ssh
autoreconf -f -i
./configure
make && make tests

Build-time Customisation

There are many build-time customisation options available. All Autoconf destination path flags (e.g. --prefix) are supported (and are usually required if you want to install OpenSSH).

For a full list of available flags, run ./configure --help but a few of the more frequently-used ones are described below. Some of these flags will require additional libraries and/or headers be installed.

Development

Portable OpenSSH development is discussed on the openssh-unix-dev mailing list (archive mirror). Bugs and feature requests are tracked on our Bugzilla.

Reporting bugs

Non-security bugs may be reported to the developers via Bugzilla or via the mailing list above. Security bugs should be reported to openssh@openssh.com.