Mosh: An Interactive Remote Shell for Mobile Clients
Author(s)
Winstein, Keith J.; Balakrishnan, Hari
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Mosh (mobile shell) is a remote terminal application that supports intermittent connectivity, allows roaming, and speculatively and safely echoes user keystrokes for better interactive response over high-latency paths. Mosh is built on the State Synchronization Protocol (SSP), a new UDP-based protocol that securely synchronizes client and server state, even across changes of the client’s IP address. Mosh uses SSP to synchronize a character-cell terminal emulator, maintaining terminal state at both client and server to predictively echo keystrokes. Our evaluation analyzed keystroke traces from six different users covering a period of 40 hours of real-world usage. Mosh was able to immediately display the effects of 70% of the user keystrokes. Over a commercial EV-DO (3G) network, median keystroke response latency with Mosh was less than 5 ms, compared with 503 ms for SSH. Mosh is free software, available from http://mosh.mit.edu. It was downloaded more than 15,000 times in the first week of its release.
Date issued
2012-06Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceJournal
Proceedings of 2012 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June 13-15, 2012, Boston, Mass.
Publisher
Advanced Computing Systems Association
Citation
Winstein, Keith and Hari Balakrishnan. "Mosh: An Interactive Remote Shell for Mobile Clients." in Proceedings of 2012 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June 13-15, 2012, Boston, Mass., 2012.
Version: Author's final manuscript