If you want to be properly anonymous, don't use public key authentication (ssh -o 'PubkeyAuthentication no' [email protected]). Otherwise, anyone in the chat can /whois you and get your public key hash - and they could pretty easily deanonymize you if you use that same key on GitHub (https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/auditing-github-users-keys) or potentially other services.

A professor of mine offered small extra credit over zoom classes if we found ways to cheat. We took our exams on an online IDE that had a built in shell with networking. SSH chat was an easy 5 points.

Why not just use write(1) on any prompt to chat with other user logged into a normal shell?

I can't imagine there's much benefit to it or that the goal was to be better than the existing inter-session tools in Linux.

But I built an ssh server in go once, which was a fun way to learn the deeper features and flows of the SSH protocol.

I think it's cool to see someone else doing something similar. Like affirmation that my curiosity (and maybe some stumbling too) is something worth cultivating

Dedicated constrained-use service.

The chat server permits chat, but no other shell functions (one would hope).

Pretty cool. What did you use to build it?

ssh-chat is written in Go and uses the stock golang/crypto library with some other upstream dependencies for terminal interactions. ssh-chat was written by HN member shazow https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shazow