Secure File Transfer
Pragma FortressSSH provides full secure file transfer capability by including the required server and clients. The Secure Shell (SSH) environment defines two standards for file transfers: SCP and SFTP. Secure File Transfer mechanism works over a secure ssh-sshd established session. This session is invoked by the file transfer client program transparently. The only affect the user will see is that they have to supply the credential for authentication, like a password, before a file operation can be done. The following diagrams give a pictorial view of how the secure file transfer works:
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Scp based secure file copying works in both SSH1 and SSH2 environment. Scp is both a file copying server and client and uses ssh-sshd secure tunnel under the hood to securely copy files between systems. See SCP for more information.
SFTP has been defined and integrated with SSH2 server to make file copying and management easier. An sftp client program works similar to ftp client user interface and uploads or downloads files and directories from an sftp-server. SFTP also uses, under-the-hood, ssh client on the client side and sshd server on the server side to create the secure tunnel over which all data transfer and commands travel. See SFTP Server and SFTP Client for more information.
A third, indirect, way to copy files is to pipe the standard FTP traffic through the secure shell environment, using port forwarding. The channel is redirected by configuring the client to monitor the ftp port, then pipe data through the secure shell session. Copying files this way is less secure, due to the fact that the data channel, only the information channel, is not piped through the secure shell pipe. See Port Forwarding for more information.
Pragma's Fortress package supports all of these file transfer features.
All commercial third party file transfer clients and servers which are Secure Shell standard based interoperates with Pragma's file transfer clients and servers. These vendors' solutions have been tested to work with Pragma's:
SSH Communications (Unix and Windows)
F-Secure (Unix and Windows)
OpenSSH (Unix)
Van Dyke Technologies (Windows)