It has always annoyed me that the OpenSSH team removed the 'none' cipher. They claim that it is for our own good, but is that really the unix way? I have no need for encryption when transfering files on my local network, and I'd rather not use additional tools like rcp or ftp when scp should be able to do the job.
I have decided to maintain a version of OpenSSH on my own with the 'none' cipher re-enabled. This is OpenSSH-None.
I have heard a lot of people claim that encryption doesn't really affect transfer times. This may be true with modern gigahertz machines, but it is generally a very false assumpton. To show why I believe the 'none' cipher is useful, I transfered a 50mb file between two of my machines using both the 'none' cipher, as well as the default cipher. The results are presented below.
The test setup:
skylab is a 4/3ghz/512MB RAM Athlon XP desktop running Gentoo linux. zarya is an old P166/80MB RAM machine running OpenBSD.
Both machines are equipped with slightly different versions of Intel's EtherExpress PRO/100 on a full-duplex network.
The test:
A screenshot of the results.
As you can see, the transfer completed in less than 1/2 the time using the 'none' cipher vs the default cipher.
