Most customers who use SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) for file transfer automation prefer to authenticate SFTP clients through SFTP keys instead of passwords. Given the numerous inquiries on how to set up and use SFTP public key authentication, we decided to publish how-to articles to help organizations that wish to implement this authentication method in their SFTP environment. This article will focus on setting up instructions for the command line.

Let's say you have trading partners who can only transfer files to you via SFTP. Incidentally, you also happen to have an account on Azure Blob Storage and you prefer to store those files there. You're probably thinking: How can I automatically copy files from my SFTP server to Azure Blob Storage? That's easy if you're using JSCAPE MFT Server. We'll show you one-on-one, if you request a free trial.

JSCAPE MFT Server makes it easy to strengthen secure file transfers with OpenPGP encryption and decryption. But before you can protect your files with this cryptography method, you need to create the necessary public/private key pairs. In this post, we'll introduce you to three ways of doing that.

Overview

In this post, you'll learn how to set up a HTTPS file transfer. We'll begin with a Quick Start, where you'll use the default settings in order to get a HTTPS file transfer service up and running with just a few clicks. After that, we'll tackle some of the more advanced settings so you can choose your desired set of SSL/TLS cipher suites and server key. Your choice of cipher suites and keys will have an effect on the security of your HTTPS file sharing and its compatibility with your users' web browsers.

An Overview of HMAC

Data integrity checks are vital to secure communications. They enable communicating parties to verify the integrity and authenticity of the messages they receive. In secure file transfer protocols like FTPS, SFTP, and HTTPS, data integrity/message authentication is usually achieved through a mechanism known as HMAC (Hash-based message authentication code). In this post, we explain what HMAC is, its basic inner workings, and how it secures data transfers.

When I first read about HSTS, my first reaction was, "What's this? A replacement for HTTPS? Considering the ubiquity of HTTPS, shouldn't we be working to improve it first instead of replacing it?" Turned out, my initial understanding of HTTP Strict Transport Security was off the mark.

As you scout for the most cost-effective way of transmitting files with your business units and trading partners, among the many file sharing solutions that will likely stand out are free FTP servers. Most of these software applications are already bundled (or readily available through repositories) in operating systems like Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, so they likely don't require additional costs ... or so it seems.

Overview

How do you strengthen a server's user authentication system? Well, one solution would be to add another authentication method. Most servers authenticate users through the usual username-password technique. If you can augment that with another method, you'll be able to make it more difficult for unauthorized users to break in. For servers whose users connect through Web browsers, one option would be something called client certificate authentication. Let's explore what this is.

Overview

People who use SSL/TLS to secure their online transactions/file transfers are mostly only familiar with two of its security functions: 1. That it can encrypt data in transit and 2. That it can enable clients to authenticate the server. They're likely not making use of another feature that can greatly enhance SSL security even more - client certificate authentication.

If you've been following our posts, you know that client certificate authentication has been the subject of our discussion lately. However, we've never been able to talk about how to enable it on the server side. This quick post will be all about that.

Because Microsoft Windows doesn't have a secure file transfer protocol server built in, we've put together a simple and easy-to-follow tutorial on how to install an SFTP server on Windows. 

The SFTP server we'll be using for this tutorial is JSCAPE MFT Server, a managed file transfer server that supports SFTP connections and several other file transfer protocols like FTP, FTPS, HTTP/S, WebDAV, AS2 and OFTP, as well as SSL and TLS. JSCAPE also offers a cloud solution called MFTaaS.