Mosh Ad Hoc Access Control

The connection is alive, even while you move between networks and lose signal. This is Mosh Ad Hoc Access Control — the decisive way to manage who can connect, when, and under what conditions, without sacrificing the resilience Mosh is known for.

Mosh (Mobile Shell) was built for roaming connections, intermittent links, and long-lived sessions across unstable networks. But by default, it trusts the backend SSH layer for authentication. That works — until you need fine-grained, real-time control over session permissions. Ad hoc access control extends Mosh’s capabilities, giving you the power to grant, revoke, and adjust user access on demand, without restarting servers or breaking active connections.

With Mosh Ad Hoc Access Control, policy is not static. Rules can be bound to roles, schedules, IP ranges, or state data. You can limit a user’s scope quickly, isolating risk in seconds. Integration with external identity providers is direct, so you can tie ephemeral access to JWTs, OAuth tokens, or custom APIs. This means compliance enforcement happens at the session layer, not days later in logs.

Security is sharper when control is immediate. Traditional SSH kill switches are coarse; they drop a session but don’t adapt mid-stream. Mosh’s ad hoc mode can freeze specific commands, block data paths, or terminate activity as conditions change. For operations teams, that means responding to incidents before damage spreads. For engineering, it means building smarter services that react to context — bandwidth, location, threat level — in real time.

The performance cost is near zero. Mosh’s protocol handles state locally and sends only deltas. Ad hoc rules ride alongside without slowing the flow. Deploying it is straightforward: wrap your Mosh server startup with a policy engine, connect it to your chosen auth source, and include hooks to manage rules via API or CLI. From there, you have the granular visibility and control that static SSH setups cannot match.

Mosh Ad Hoc Access Control is not an experiment. It’s a method for modern teams to lock down transport without losing the continuity Mosh was built for. When you can act within an active session, your access control becomes dynamic — almost alive.

See it live in minutes. Build and run Mosh Ad Hoc Access Control with hoop.dev and take control before the next connection is made.