Protocol inspection : All traffic is inspected and only permitted across the firewall if it fully complies to the SSH-2 protocol. This feature provides effective protection against a great number of attacks exploiting vulnerabilities of server and client applications, including buffer overflow vulnerabilities.

Verify encryption method : The internal parameters of the connections can also be controlled, allowing the proxy to enforce the use of selected encryption methods (cipher type, key length, etc.), thus provide protection against downgrade attacks.

Control user authentication : The different authentication methods can be separately enabled or disabled, e.g.: it is possible to enforce the use of strong authentication methods by completely disabling password based authentication. User-level filtering and access control can also be performed. Although this can obviously be done on the servers themselves, PNS as an external device provides these features reliably even if the server or the client machines get compromised.

Control of SSH channels : There is full control over the SSH channels, i.e. it can be specified which channels are allowed to and from a given server or in a given connection. For instance, file transfer, port forwarding, or X forwarding can be separately enabled/disabled based on various criteria.

Disable agent forwarding : Agent forwarding can be disabled, thus prevent that the keys used in the internal network become accessible on external machines.

Control remote command execution : The SSH protocol can be fully inspected, thus it can be specified which commands are allowed, which ones are disabled. More sophisticated decisions can also be made based on the parameters of the session, e.g.: to allow the execution of a command only to certain users, etc.