It's strange that sshd is failing without there being any error message. Perhaps you can try installing utelnetd on the device, and then running a telnet session from your desktop. You may pick up error messages that way that somehow don't appear in pbterm. You can get utelnetd from this thread:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=183401
Run the following command on the device to see what version of openssl is installed:
strings /ebrmain/lib/libcrypto.so | grep OpenSSL
Somewhere in the output should be a line that looks something like this:
OpenSSL 1.0.1m 19 Mar 2015
Yours will have a different version number and date, I presume. If it comes to it, it may be easier for me to hack the SDK and build openssh for your device than try to explain all the steps to you.