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.

Overview

[Last updated: December 2020] Malicious insiders and careless insiders are increasingly posing serious risks to file transfer systems. If nothing is done to mitigate them, these internal threats can cause data loss or, worse, massive penalty-inducing data breaches. In this post, we take a closer look at internal threats, how they put file transfer systems at risk, and what you can do to mitigate them.

Businesses that deal with large files such as high-definition videos, 3D CAD models, and so on, sometimes need to transfer these files to another department or to a trading partner located in another state, country, or continent. In situations like this, it pays to know how to securely transfer large files over the Internet.

Overview

Let's say you want to install an SSH FTP server (SFTP) on a Linux machine devoid of a GUI. However, after installation, you don't want to configure it (add users, create keys, enable public key authentication, choose algorithms, etc.) locally, moreso via the SFTP client. Instead, you want this SFTP server to be configured remotely through a graphical Web user interface. This is how we recommend you do it.

Files you upload to an Amazon S3 trading partner through JSCAPE MFT Server are normally stored in plaintext. If you want to encrypt those files to minimize the risk of a data breach, one way to do that is by using AES-256 Amazon S3 server-side encryption. We'll show you how to use this particular service in this post.

Overview: What Is AS2 Protocol?

AS2 (Applicability Statement 2) is a file transfer protocol (FTP) that supports fully automated, server-to-server file transfers. It's suitable for two or more parties who often transact with each other and require paper-free transfers that ensure message integrity, security and reliability.

In one of our previous posts, we talked about the importance of authenticating an SFTP host before logging into it and how to use the host's RSA key fingerprint to carry out the authentication. The same principle applies when you import a user's client key for public key authentication.