SSH Tricks Ssh is the descendent of rsh and rlogin, which were non-encrypted programs like telnet for remote shell logins. All three have a long lineage but are now outdated, insecure, and should be buried. However, they have lots of nifty features which have evolved over two decades of Unix. ssh includes a number of these features. You can use ssh just like telnet for logins, but it does much more.