Session resumption for the secure shell protocol

The secure shell protocol (SSH) is widely deployed to access command line interfaces of network devices and host systems over an insecure network. Recently, the IETF has produced specifications how to run network management protocols such as NETCONF or SNMP over SSH. SSH computes new session keys whenever a new SSH session is established. This computationally expensive operation causes significant latency and processor load on low end devices and thus makes short-lived connections very expensive. To address this problem, we describe a session resumption feature that allows clients to resume sessions without having to compute new session keys.