Jared Evans Global Microbrand

One of the reasons I switched to BlackBerry 8800 is because of the availability of many third party applications.  Blackberries are very popular in the enterprise space so there are many excellent programs available for working professionals.

I was seeking out a SSH mobile application that I could use to securely log into UNIX servers. I require that the SSH mobile program has support for Private/Public Key Authentication.  Any server that opens up the SSH port on the Internet without private/public key authentication is basically begging to be hacked.  It’s a bit more complicated to set up the private/public key authentication properly. The advantage is that this authentication method will raise the bar so high for a secure connection and make it extraordinarily difficult for any would-be hackers to correctly guess both encrypted keys and the secret passphrase.

Entering the secure login picture: Idokorro Mobile SSH.  I successfully used this mobile SSH program to remotely login a UNIX server with SSH private/public key authentication.

You can use a PuTTY file called PuTTYgen (an RSA and DSA key generation utility) to generate the private/public key pair. You will need to export the private key to OpenSSH format for the Idokorro Mobile SSH config.  Add the public key to your account on the UNIX server and you should be all set!

Here’s an example of a SSH login on my blackberry 8800:

While it’s slower over the mobile network, the VT100 emulation works like a charm (use the xterm emulation if you want the colors).