FTP Strong Authentication

[Mary Russo]

We have a requirement to accomplish FTP strong authentication between our HPUX 10.20 (now, soon to be 11.0) servers behind a firewall and WNT platforms, SUN platforms, and IBM mainframes of which most will be behind firewalls. I have heard of a technology called S/Key or MD5 which runs in UNIX and hopefully on INTEL and IBM platforms which we could possibly explore using. Does HPUX have it available for download? If not, is it in the public domain? If not, any help on what vendor has it? Many thanx!

[Ralf Hildebrandt]

Ditch FTP. It has no provisions for strong authentication, against connection hijacking or eavesdropping.

The correct solution is to use SSH, SFTP, SCP or rsync over ssh.

Read:
http://www.securityportal.com/cover/coverstory20000814.html

[Mike Brown_3]

I tend to agree with Ralf above, but having used s/key on Unix in the past, I still believe it to be a serious alternative.
To find out what it is, how to use it and where to get it from, please try;
http://lheawww.gsfc.nasa.gov/~srr/skey_info.html or
http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/ToolsUnixAuth.html#Skey

[Brian Markus · Accepted solution]

I use sftp that comes with SSH. I have it running on my 10.20 and 11.0 platforms. It's runs just like SSH but for ftp transfers.
http://www.ssh.com

Hope this helps

Brian