When you first start scouting for the right file transfer protocol for your organization, you’re bound to encounter these two acronyms: SFTP and MFT. SFTP stands for SSH File Transfer Protocol, whereas MFT stands for Managed File Transfer. While SFTP is indeed a protocol, MFT isn’t. Nevertheless, these two acronyms become increasingly intertwined once you explore advanced, secure, automated file transfer solutions.

Some people are unsure of the difference between MFT Gateway and SFTP server. These are two distinct applications with different core functionalities. Combine them, and you’ll get a more secure, compliant, and highly available file transfer environment.

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) are two cryptographic software tools that enable data encryption, authentication, and integrity. These tools primarily secure email communications and transfer files. In the case of the latter, PGP and GPG can be particularly useful in providing data-in-motion security for unencrypted file transfer protocols like FTP and HTTP. They also provide data-at-rest encryption for files stored in a file transfer server.

Automated SFTP file transfers are traditionally done through scripts, but there's a much easier way. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to automate SFTP file transfers without scripting a single line of code.

Overview

In an earlier quickstart guide to setting up an AS2 server, we featured a manual method for sending EDI messages. Because EDI transactions are best carried out automatically, we thought it would be a good idea to show you how to implement real-time transactions on the same solution we used in that post.

AS2 (applicability statement 2) uses public keys and private keys to encrypt files being transferred between IP addresses. With AS2, security, authentication, message integrity and privacy are ensured with encryption, digital certificates and nonrepudiation techniques. AS2 provides greater security for your EDI data than standard FTP, supporting synchronous and asynchronous MDN (message disposition notification) and digital signatures.

Plus, with JSCAPE's AS2 server you can send files regardless of file size and content type.

In this tutorial, we'll walk you through the basic steps of how to set up and configure an AS2 server.

AS2 uses public keys and private keys to encrypt/decrypt file transfers, strengthening security around sensitive documents and information. While AS1 relied on SMTP, AS2 uses S/MIME and HTTP/S to move data between IP addresses. With AS2, security, authentication, message integrity and privacy are ensured with encryption, digital certificates and nonrepudiation techniques.

Below are the initial steps that will eventually allow you to carry out EDI transactions with an increasing number of trading partners already using this popular B2B file transfer protocol.

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.

Overview

SFTP provides an alternative method for ssh client authentication. It's called SFTP public key authentication. This method allows users to login to your SFTP service without using password authentication and is often employed for file transfer automation. In this post, we'll walk you through the process of setting up this kind of authentication on the command line. It's easier to do this on a GUI-based interface but if you prefer to do things on the terminal, this post is for you.

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.

This tutorial is for those who 1) understand the vulnerabilities of FTP but still want to learn how it's used AND 2) prefer doing things on the FTP command line.