Mosh: an interactive remote shell for mobile clients

  • Authors:
  • Keith Winstein;Hari Balakrishnan

  • Affiliations:
  • M.I.T. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge, Mass.;M.I.T. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge, Mass.

  • Venue:
  • USENIX ATC'12 Proceedings of the 2012 USENIX conference on Annual Technical Conference
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

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 charactercell 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.