Tatu Ylönen
More info
- Known for
- The SSH protocol
- Released
- 1995
- Affiliation
- Helsinki University of Technology, SSH Communications Security
Finnish researcher who wrote the first version of SSH after someone sniffed passwords off his university's network.
In spring 1995 a password sniffer was discovered on the network at Helsinki University of Technology. Ylönen's answer was an encrypted replacement for Telnet and rlogin, released as free software that July. By the end of the year it had some twenty thousand users in about fifty countries.
He asked IANA for port 22 — conveniently sitting between FTP's 21 and Telnet's 23 — and got it. In December 1995 he founded SSH Communications Security, and as the licence terms tightened, OpenBSD developers forked an early free release into OpenSSH, which is what almost everyone actually runs today.