The cryptography is standard AES-128 in OCB3 mode. It's been around long enough, and has had enough security scrutiny to at least discover a few minor DoS vulnerabilities, that it isn't entirely unreviewed.
It's client-side, so works even if the remote system is totally hung and did not clearly disconnect.
For example, running `systemctl suspend` will not terminate active SSH connections before putting the destination machine into a sleep state, and thus Ctrl+C (which isn't processed by SSH) will do nothing until the remote host is woken up by some mechanism.
The vast minority of utilities in the United States, by number of customers served, are investor-owned; publicly-owned and co-operative utilities only cover 50m people.[1]
Theoretically, the grid is supervised by the California Public Utilities Commission, which has wide latitude to set standards and regulations for PG&E and others. The Public Utility Code is the highest law in the state of California[2], so IMHO a large part of the blame for PG&E's failures fall on CPUC's failed oversight[3][4]
Sure, which is why we have `libopenssl0.9.8`, `libopenssl1.0.0`, etc. In Debian at least, the policy is that package names for libraries should include something approximating the SONAME to allow for exactly this.
Eventually you drop the old one, because you can no longer provide security support or for some other reason. But if there are compelling reasons otherwise, distributions can and do provide multiple ABIs for the same library.
The cryptography is standard AES-128 in OCB3 mode. It's been around long enough, and has had enough security scrutiny to at least discover a few minor DoS vulnerabilities, that it isn't entirely unreviewed.
For the cipher itself, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCB_mode#Attacks