Raspberry Pi SSH cipher speed

I was curious to see how quickly I could transfer files to my Pi using SSH rather than FTP. Obviously using FTP is way faster than almost any other method, but still I wanted to see how fast I could transfer data over SSH.

Here’s the time it took to transfer a 50 MB file to my Pi using different SSH ciphers.

I later re-tested the aes128-ctr cipher and it took about a second less than what I’d recorded initially. This boils down to:

• Don’t use triple-DES ever, for both performance and security reasons
• Most other ciphers give about the same performance, and are generally considered secure
• arcfour is the fastest class of ciphers, but there is less trust in it from the crypto community. If you’re going to use it, try to avoid the base arcfour cipher and instead use the 128 or 256 version, which tosses out some of the initial bits as a precaution