SSH

A raw TCP probe, not HTTP — address is host or host:port, no scheme. Port defaults to 22 when omitted. Reads the identification string every SSH server sends unprompted the instant a client connects (RFC 4253 §4.2) — no authentication, no key exchange, just the TCP connection.

Not tied to one vendor: OpenSSH, Dropbear, and anything else speaking the SSH transport protocol all identify themselves the same way, which is why the product is generic ssh rather than one probe per implementation.

targets:
  - id: bastion-main
    product: ssh
    address: bastion.example.com:22

Authentication

None — the banner is sent before any authentication step exists.

What “version” means here

version is the software string exactly as reported, e.g. OpenSSH_10.3 or OpenSSH_9.6p1 — not a normalized number, since ssh covers multiple unrelated implementations. Any trailing distro comment (e.g. Ubuntu’s Ubuntu-3ubuntu13.18 suffix) is discarded rather than treated as part of the version.

Recorded fields

• version — the software string
• extra.protocol — the SSH protocol version, e.g. 2.0

Lifecycle resolver

None — ssh isn’t one product with one lifecycle calendar; OpenSSH and Dropbear each have their own, and a probe’s Meta is static regardless of what a given target turns out to be running. Inventory-only.