Secure file transfer protocol: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 05:49, 8 February 2009

Revision as of 03:52, 18 March 2009

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The ambiguity comes from the acronym for the SSH-based [[SSH File Transfer Protocol]] having the same acronym as one of the terms referring to tunneling true FTP connections over SSH: Secure FTP. The real SFTP protocol does not use FTP, but it is implemented in a diverse array of clients such as [[FileZilla]], [[WinSCP]], and the command line program 'sftp' from the [[OpenSSH]] project included on most GNU/Linux and BSD distributions. Clients which implement tunneling raw FTP over SSH (so-called Secure FTP) are much more rare, but include version 3 of [[SSH Communications Security]]'s software suite, and the [[GPL]] licensed [http://fonc.sourceforge.net FONC].

The ambiguity comes from the [[secure file transfer program]] (sftp) which is an [[FTP client]] using an [[SSH]] connection (i.e. [[FTP over SSH]]). Then [[FTP over SSH]] has been also referred as [[Secure File Transfer Protocol]] and abbreviated as [[SFTP]]. The command line sftp does not use the [[SSH File Transfer Protocol]].

However, other ''secure'' FTP clients, as [[FileZilla]], uses the abbreviation [[SFTP]] to refer to the [[SSH File Transfer Protocol]].