Communication scheme makes popular applications ‘gracefully mobile’
The Secure Shell, or SSH, is a popular program that lets computer users log onto remote machines. Software developers use it for large collaborative projects, students use it to work from university servers, customers of commercial cloud-computing services use it access their accounts, and system administrators use it to manage computers on their networks.First released in 1995, SSH was designed for an Internet consisting of stationary machines, and it hasn’t evolved with the mobile Internet. Among other problems, it can’t handle roaming: If you close your laptop at the office and reopen it at home, your SSH session will have died; the same goes for an SSH session on a tablet computer that switches from a Wi-Fi connection to the cellular network.At the Usenix Annual Technical Conference in Boston this month, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial ...