Secure Access to your Account

The hostnames to use when connecting to your math department account are lab1.math.uic.edu for undergraduate accounts and math.uic.edu for graduate/faculty accounts.

Normally, when you use rlogin, telnet, ftp and pop services, every bit of your transaction, including your username and password, are transmitted over the internet in plain view. Hackers can listen in on these transmissions, and are in the habit of doing so to collect usernames and passwords.

By using the secure shell (SSH) and secure copy (SCP) programs, you can encrypt all transactions between two computers (e.g. home and work), making it prohibitively difficult to eavesdrop on them. We recommend that you use these programs exclusively in place of telnet and ftp. This generally allows you to use anonymous ftp and a mail reader on the remote machine to avoid ever transmitting an unencrypted password.

The links below should help you install SSH and SCP on your home and office computers.

• Nifty Telnet SSH: SSH and SCP for Macintosh. (Does it work in the US? We think so.) If you have trouble unpacking the downloaded file, try downloading Stuffit Expander or ask a systems administrator for a copy of Nifty Telnet on a floppy disk.
• For Windows users we have a self-extracting version of TTSSH. If you don't like TTSSH try PUTTY, which is highly recommended by Charlie Tier. For secure file transfers we have a local copy of WinSCP.
• Most UNIX machines on campus already have ssh and scp installed. The source code is available from the OpenBSD Project. To begin a terminal session just type ssh username@hostname.domain.name. To copy a file to another computer just type scp file username@hostname.domain.name:/directory/path/. The scp command works like the cp command, so you must know the names of the files and directories before using it. For help, see the online manual pages for ssh and scp.

If asked, select the SSH or D3 protocol (rather than plain telnet) to ensure that your connection is encrypted.

SSH was designed for high security applications. It will notify you when you use it to connect to a machine you haven't connected to before, and generates scary warning messages when a machine you connect to has had its operating system upgraded. If you are having difficulty using the program or interpreting error messages, please send email to consult@math.uic.edu.

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