An introduction to HyperSSH

I found and started playing around with HyperSSH a few days ago. All I can say is this:

Revolutionary and a joy to use.

I found Hyperssh by accident a few days ago while investigating another cool project called Atek. It's pretty simple, but very powerful. It's just SSH, but you can use it from anywhere without having to set up any kind of port forwarding or reverse ssh proxy etc. All you need to do is:

• Ensure your regular ssh server is working.
• Run hyperssh-server from your terminal of choice.
• Note down the output you get. You should get a response that gives you your fingerprint and the user account that you'll be connecting with (it'll be the same user that you ran hyperssh-server with).
• Paste that command from any other machine and voila, ssh wherever you are!

By default, hyperssh-server will run ssh-keyscan and generate a fingerprint based on a random key suite you have available. This is mostly convenient but it can lead to some issues across reboots of the server device. I ended up installing a fork of Hyperssh (the one I linked at the start of the article) that only uses RSA for it's keygen. This means I only need to have the RSA key noted down :D.

Putting the SSH in HyperSSH

I'll start by assuming that you know what SSH is if you're reading this. If you don't know what SSH is, read this.
Okay okay, I won't just dump a page on you and then expect you to read the whole thing. I'll give you a basic overview and then we'll continue. Deal? Alright.

SSH(Secure Shell) is a network protocol that is used to connect from one computer (your Macbook for example) to a remote machine (usually some kind of server that you're administering). Basically, SSH lets you remotely access a computer via a terminal and use it as if you were right there.
Pretty simple, right?

Activating Hyper mode

Now that you know what SSH is, we can start to dive into the interesting part.

What makes SSH become hyper? Why, it's HyperSwarm, of course!
Oh, you don't know what HyperSwarm is? Makes sense, if I have an explanation for what SSH is, I abosolutely need to explain what HyperSwarm is!
Let's get started then.

What even is a hyper swarm?

^{Is that a bee thing?}

Funny you should mention bees. That's another part of the overall Hypercore protocol; But that's beyond our current scope for this post.
Anyway. On to HyperSwarm now.

HyperSwarm is, as stated on the github page, A distributed networking stack for connecting peers.
Hopefully that description helps you start to get a basic idea of where this is leading... If not, keep on reading! _{Please keep reading anyway :D.}
In high level terms (and that's all I have current understanding of too!):
HyperSwarm is a high-level API for finding and connecting to peers who are interested in a "topic" that uses the HyperSwarm DHT and MDNS for peer lookups and announces.
So, in easy to understand english: HyperSwarm is a peer to peer discovery "service" that allows you to easily find other peers without the need to do complex network setups that can potentially expose your network.

Quick discovery SSH?

Put simply, HyperSSH is just SSH with HyperSwarm slapped on top of it for the sake of "ease of access". This makes administering home servers so much easier (or at least it does for me, being a bit too lazy to mess around with setting up port forwarding and DDNS etc. I don't use my home server for hosting anything that is publicly facing anyway!).

I think HyperSSH is awesome, thanks for reading about it! Hopefully this has inspired you to give it a go too!

A few quick tips/hints about my usage/experience with HyperSSH

• I use a forked version of HyperSSH that uses rsa for the server fingerprint every time. This is helpful because it means you only need one command saved in a text file or whatever (a password manager perhaps?) to be able to get into your remote machine every time.


• Because HyperSSH is a nodejs app, it's a little bit more finicky to get it to autostart on system boot. What I ended up doing was using pm2 to ensure that I can reliably autostart HyperSSH and get much better management tools(Such as easy access to logs and even a terminal based monitoring app to see how HyperSSH is doing! Perfect when you're main interface is via SSH).


• HyperSSH can be used for setting up SSH proxies. If you want to browse the web safely while at a shady cafe (one that doesn't have WPA3 wifi yet!), then you can use HyperSSH to connect to your home server (or a preconfigured "browsing machine" that you've got set up somewhere) and browse as if you were connecting through there! This of course requires you to set up a SOCKS5 proxy as well.