Programmable, secure FTP replacement.

Question

We need to move off traditional FTP for security purposes (it transmits it's passwords unencrypted). I am hearing SSH touted as the obvious alternative. However I have been driving FTP from an ASP.NET program interface to automate my web-site development, which is now quite a highly web-enabled process.

Can anyone recommend a secure way to transfer files around which has a program interface that I can drive from ASP.NET?

Answer 1

We have used a variation of this solution in the past which uses the SSH Factory for .NET

Answer 2

sharpssh implements sending files via scp.

Answer 3

G'day,

You might like to look at ProFPD.

Heavily customisable. Based on Apache module structure.

From their web site:

ProFTPD grew out of the desire to have a secure and configurable FTP server, and out of a significant admiration of the Apache web server.

We use our adapted version for large scale transfer of web content. Typically 300,000 updates per day.

HTH

cheers,

Rob

Answer 4

The traditional secure replacement for FTP is SFTP, but if you have enough control over both endpoints, you might consider rsync instead: it is highly configurable, secure just by telling it to use ssh, and far more efficient for keeping two locations in sync.

Answer 5

Hi, the question has three subquestions:

1) choosing the secure transfer protocol

The secure version of old FTP exists - it's called FTP/SSL (plain old FTP over SSL encrypted channel). Maybe you can still use your old deployment infrastructure - just check whether it supports the FTPS or FTP/SSL.

You can check details about FTP, FTP/SSL and SFTP differences at http://www.rebex.net/secure-ftp.net/ page.

2) SFTP or FTP/SSL server for Windows

When you choose whether to use SFTP or FTPS you have to deploy the proper server. For FTP/SSL we use the Gene6 (http://www.g6ftpserver.com/) on several servers without problems. There is plenty of FTP/SSL Windows servers so use whatever you want. The situation is a bit more complicated with SFTP server for Windows - there is only a few working implementations. The Bitvise WinHTTPD looks quite promising (http://www.bitvise.com/winsshd).

3) Internet File Transfer Component for ASP.NET

Last part of the solution is secure file transfer from asp.net. There is several components on the market. I would recommend the Rebex File Transfer Pack - it supports both FTP (and FTP/SSL) and SFTP (SSH File Transfer).

Following code shows how to upload a file to the server via SFTP. The code is taken from our Rebex SFTP tutorial page.

// create client, connect and log in 
Sftp client = new Sftp();
client.Connect(hostname);
client.Login(username, password);

// upload the 'test.zip' file to the current directory at the server 
client.PutFile(@"c:\data\test.zip", "test.zip");

// upload the 'index.html' file to the specified directory at the server 
client.PutFile(@"c:\data\index.html", "/wwwroot/index.html");

// download the 'test.zip' file from the current directory at the server 
client.GetFile("test.zip", @"c:\data\test.zip");

// download the 'index.html' file from the specified directory at the server 
client.GetFile("/wwwroot/index.html", @"c:\data\index.html");

// upload a text using a MemoryStream 
string message = "Hello from Rebex SFTP for .NET!";
byte[] data = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(message);
System.IO.MemoryStream ms = new System.IO.MemoryStream(data);
client.PutFile(ms, "message.txt");

Martin