“JSch is a pure Java implementation of SSH2.” It’s great that the license is BSD style.

This package is easy to use and comes with some nice demo programs. I was able to quickly adapt their SSH tunnels demo so that before starting the real main in a jMatter.org application (which was being launched via Java Web Start) a SSH tunnel was established. Then the jMatter.org application makes a database connection to 127.0.0.1 which really goes through the SSH tunnel to the UNIX box with the database server on it. This way the database server’s TCP socket doesn’t have to be directly exposed to the Internet.

Still to do is tweaking things so each end user has a unique tunnel… maybe with ssh keys…

BTW It’s interesting that the top page returned by googling SSH tunnel is http://www.rzg.mpg.de/networking/tunnelling.html. There’s a nice picture there: