SFTP vs FTPS: tough choices

Las week, I had to design in a hurry a secure file transfer mechanism between two DMZs on a zero budget which, in a nutshell, meant reusing the Windows servers that are already there, and not purchase any third party software.

I had to choose between using SFTP, a nice protocol, and FTPS, which I've been comparing to a bastard child for years.

I don't like FTPS mostly because it's a patch on FTP. For one, FTPS is harder to firewall than SFTP; it behaves exactly like the standard FTP with a control and data connection, the difference being that TLS is used to encrypt them. Like with standard FTP servers, the server must be configured with a fixed range of passive ports, and the firewall must let these ports through. Why? Because the firewall has no way of knowing what dynamic port has been assigned to a passive data connection... it can't sniff it out the control connection either, as it's encrypted!

Even though it's not exactly what I would call an elegant protocol, is FTPS actually easy to work with? The answer is yes: I was able to install IIS 7.5's FTP publishing service in 2008 R2 and have an FTPS server working within minutes. That is good enough. And in IT, good enough is, well, Good Enough.

So, here are my thoughts:

If your server will be hosted on any kind of Unix, choose SFTP. It has been built-in with OpenSSH for years. The drawback of OpenSSH is that it doesn't support virtual users, and this can make high availability tricky; you'll need to synchronize /etc/passwd entries, even if using AD authentication.

On the other hand, if you will host the service on Windows, you might be better off going with FTPS as it is included with IIS 7.5 and there is even high availability that is possible. To support SFTP on Windows, you either need to install unsupported open-source software (unacceptable in many secure, enterprise environments) or purchase a third-party product such as WS_FTP Server (which carries a premium if you need SFTP functionality).

As for CLI clients that support automation, no matter the platform you use, there are plenty to choose from. For SFTP, on Unix just use the sftp command and on Windows, try Putty's excellent psftp.exe. For FTPS, I suggest you try cURL which is multi-platform on Unix and Windows.

So, to conclude: SFTP if using a Unix server, FTPS if using a Windows server.

In my case, I'm going with FTPS.

O.