Subject: A future for the SSH File Transfer Protocol?

From: Mats Gustafsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2001 16:22:50 +0100

Hi everyone,

The "SSH File Transfer Protocol" draft has expired and I can find
no reference to SFTP in the mailing list archive since August. This 
makes me wonder if there is anyone out there who still sees a future
for SFTP and is working on it.  Should there be a "SSH File Transfer 
Protocol" or is "Securing FTP with TLS" (draft-murray-auth-ftp-ssl-08.txt)
the way forward? 

I'd appreciate greatly if someone on this list that could fill me in on 
past and present discussions on the subject or simply share their opinions!

Best regards,
//Mats

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Mats Gustafsson                
Ericsson Radio Systems
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From: Simon Tatham <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2001 15:40:14 +0000

Mats Gustafsson  <[email-masked]> wrote:
> no reference to SFTP in the mailing list archive since August.

As far as I can tell there's very little _at all_ in the mailing
list archive since August ...

> This makes me wonder if there is anyone out there who still sees a
> future for SFTP and is working on it.

I do. I think it's extremely useful to have a file transfer protocol
within the framework of SSH, because most security-conscious people
accessing a remote account will already have set up SSH
authentication credentials.

Moreover, SFTP is a qualitative improvement over SCP, partly because
it's more general and can usefully be used for complex automated
tasks, partly because it's actually vaguely _possible_ to secure a
client against a malicious server (SCP has a wildcard issue that
makes this highly inconvenient), and largely because the range of
clients you can plausibly write is so much greater. PuTTY's SCP
client now uses SFTP as the underlying protocol whenever it can,
falling back to the old unreliable SCP only when it has no choice.

I might be the only one, however; nobody has shown much interest in
answering my clarifying questions or in the extension I proposed (to
allow user details to be looked up, so a client could understand
`~fred' and also so that the uid->username mapping in the
recommended form of the long listing could be done in other contexts
as well).

Cheers,
Simon
-- 
Simon Tatham         "What a caterpillar calls the end of the
<[email-masked]>    world, a human calls a butterfly."

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From: "Joseph Galbraith" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2001 09:07:11 -0700

> for SFTP and is working on it.

Yes, we are working on it.  We have a version ready to
go that merges in the non-objectional changes from the
version that got yanked due to the name change.

We are just waiting for a blessing from Bill
to submit it.

- Joseph