Sunday 7 February 2016

FTPS vs SFTP

We've gone through some confusion at work recently. The specifications of something we were developing would use interchangeably (and wrongly) the terms FTPS and SFTP for some data transfers that we had to perform. After a while we realised that these are 2 different things.

FTPS is just what we were thinking about. Your good, old FTP protocol joining forces with the TLS/SSL cryptographic protocol, same as HTTP and HTTPS.

SFTP, less confusingly referred as SSH File Transfer Protocol, has nothing to do with FTP, it's a completely different protocol for transferring files in a secure manner.

The FileZilla Windows cliet application helped a bit in keeping the confusion. I used to think of it as an FTP client, but along with FTP and FTPS it also supports SFTP (notice that this is so for the client, the FileZilla server does not support SFTP). Curl also supports both protocols (along with many more).

The .Net framework supports FTPS out of the box via the FtpWebRequest class, but for SFTP you'll have to use some third party library.

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