Forrest Aldrich says:

Is there a way to set up an encrypted login session, whereby the calling program would need a 'key' in order to decrypt the connection to even see the 'login: ' prompt?

There are many such systems. I suppose the kerberos suite's "klogin" is the most popular these days, and options were being defined in telnet to allow end to end encryption, though I don't know where they've gotten to at this point.

I thought I saw something like this for the ham-radio enthusiasts. It uses plain-DES to do the work. But this would require that your calling program be some type of comm prog with the decryption/encryption abilities within.

Of course it would require a special communications program on both ends -- there is no other way to do it. Perry