Overview: What Is AES?

First adopted by the U.S. government to protect classified information, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) has long gained global acceptance and is used for securing sensitive data in various industries. In this post, we'll discuss AES encryption and explain its vital role in securing sensitive files sent over the Internet.

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.

One of the major security features of SSH FTP is public key authentication. This authentication method allows JSCAPE MFT Server to verify a user's identity during login by asking for only the user's secret item — an SFTP private key file (SSH key). Using keys to authenticate users while requiring a username and passphrase gives us two-factor authentication.

Most users of JSCAPE MFT Server are already familiar with directory monitors. You often use it to monitor a directory for newly added files. Although that capability has helped immensely in automating a lot of business processes, it had its limitations. In the past, directory monitors could only be used to monitor local directories and UNC paths but not directories on remote servers. In the upcoming MFT Server 11, that's going to be possible.

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.

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.

Data connection mode

When your File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server runs behind a firewall or Network Address Translation (NAT) router, your users may sometimes encounter connectivity issues. One of the most common causes of FTP connection issues is the data connection mode being used. This mode can be either active or passive. Certain firewall configurations will only allow FTP connections if the data connection is set to a mode that works with a given configuration.

This blog will explain the differences between active and passive FTP data connection modes, how they impact firewall configurations and what mode we recommend you use going forward. Although active and passive modes are mentioned in RFC 959, the explanations can be too technical. Before we tackle the main discussion, let’s first review how FTP connections are designed.

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.

Many businesses use Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) to transfer data between business units or to trading partners. With the growing adoption of cloud solutions, it makes sense to leverage the cloud to enhance deep-rooted solutions like SFTP. For instance, you can integrate your SFTP server with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) so that files SFTP users and trading partners upload to that server are automatically forwarded to an AWS S3 bucket. 

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.