sftp

[rob fleming]

Hello,
I have been informed that I will need to start using SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) to FTP files to our production server. Are there any APIs that ship with Java that can be used for SFTP?
Thanks,
Rob

[Michael Morris]

Hi Rob,
I think SFTP is the Simple File Transfer Protocol, which is a scaled down version of FTP. Now there are Security extensions to FTP. You can read the boring white paper here RFC 2228. You can get info on a comercially available Java version here Secure FTP Wrapper. Your final alternative is write your own wrapper for client and server and do the encrypting/decrypting yourself.
Michael Morris

[Maulin Vasavada]

hi rob,
well, i think the SFTP is a Secure FTP which is a part of the Secure Shell suite like SCP (Secure Copy).
its easy to write/find FTP client written in java (i myself 've one) but it is a little complex thing to write SFTP client in java. the reason is it has to follow secure ftp conventions of,
public/private keys,
encrypting/decrypting data etc..
below links might be more useful,
link1
link2
regards
maulin.

[Maulin Vasavada]

btw Rob,
if u r on unix then u can also think of running sftp that is provided by the shell and invoke it via the shell script instead of writing SFTP (or getting SFTP in Java) from somewhere...
on windows as well u can use a script but i am not sure of sftp working on windows if there is any..
regards
maulin.

[Michael Morris]

Not to dipute Maulin but here is the rather old RFC 913 which describes SFTP or Simple File Transfer Protocol. Perhaps that acronym is now used to mean Secure File Transfer Protocol, but I'll be darned if I can find an RFC from any legitimate authority.
Michael Morris

[Maulin Vasavada]

hi Michael,
nth would dispute me easily
yeah. i saw that there is this simple file transfer protocol but usually if sftp is referred in sftp term then i guess it would mean secure ftp so i pointed in that direction...
but it was interesting to know that there is something like simple ftp thing. i didn't know it and when i saw the links u gave i's like - "wow, this is something new" ...
the point is- what Rob is actually looking for?
regards
maulin.

[rob fleming]

Thanks for the replies. It was a nice suprise to log into Exchange this morning and see all the messages telling me that someone had replied. I will definitely look at the links that each of you mentioned.
I feel as if I am stuck between a rock and a hard place. Yesterday, after posting my message I did some rather extensive looking on the Web and I found two products/APIs that may be useful. One is SSHTools, which is open source, and the other is IP*Works, which is expensive. I downloaded both of them to look at the APIs and JavaDocs and then I read the install doc for each. Both of them require Java 1.4 which is a problem because my application resides on a Weblogic 7 server which uses JDK 1.3.1_03.
Rob