ftp over ssl via openssh

[Peter Stuge]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 12:39:52PM -0800, Edward Peschko wrote:
> And unsurprisingly, google has very little information about a
> command line interface in unix that does ftp over ssl, probably
> because one doesn't exist.

Sure they do.

Searching for "unix ftp ssl" I got at least three hits on the first
two pages mentioning usable clients.
Searching for "linux ftp ssl" the very first hit was the forum thread
"Console ftp over ssl" where someone mentions netkit-ftp-ssl on
freshmeat.net.


> But seriously, why doesn't openssh do this? It seems like a pretty
> big hole in its functionality..

Not really; OpenSSH is an implementation of the SSH protocol version
1 and 2.

Included in the SSH protocol is a file transfer subsystem called
sftp which can do everything FTP does, and more.


FTP over SSL is derived from (the insecure) FTP and differs from sftp
in several other ways as well.

You should look further for Unix FTP clients that advertise support
for SSL, Gentoo Linux includes the patch for netkit-ftp-0.17 but you
could apply it manually and recompile in other distributions. The
client lftp also supports SSL.


//Peter