Secure FTP

2007 Feb 28 at 21:15 » Tagged as :security,

It's been a long time since we at Rad Inks last made a release of the Rad SFTP Applet. When it was first released it was a ground breaking applet and was even featured on the official java website. Since then it was overshadowed by Rad Upload and we have been putting more effort on the latter and not enough on the former. Finally we pulled up our socks and made a new release.

The Rad Inks Secure FTP client makes use of the SSH FTP protocol, which despite the similarity in name with the File Transfer Protocol is a much more secure system. FTP is totally insecure. With FTP all the data and commands are transferred between the client and the server in plain text. Thus with FTP user names and passwords are transmitted without encryption. Surprisingly many people don't realise this. Security conscious webmasters and organizations are moving away from FTP and embracing the more secure SFTP where all the commands and data are transferred with encryption.

Because the Rad SFTP applet runs with in the web browser an end user of the system does not need to install any software on his own computer. Because the applet is light weight it starts up almost instantly. It can rival the start up speed of a desktop client.

In this new version we have added a new menu bar which can be switched on or off. It kinds of looks like an javascript/css menu but it isn't it's part of the applet itself. Resuming an interrupted transfer is a lot easier and we now provide an option to disable the host key check. The host key check is an essential part of an security conscious software but some end users are confused by it so at times it may be better not to display the host key confrmation dialog.