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by valiant55 1103 days ago
SFTP is basically just SSH, the only thing it shares in common with FTP is the name.
3 comments

It's secure tunneled FTP. Functionally it performs the exact same way as ftp only it's not in clear text and you have better authentication options.
No, that's FTPS. FTPS wraps FTP in TLS; SFTP is a protocol in the SSH protocol that can transfer files and that happens to implement an FTP-like interface.
SSH is just the transport, you use a different protocol inside it. But yeah, it's not FTP
The only difference is the security transport / authentication, otherwise if functions the exact same way.

The original RFC for SFTP was written to actually be a simpler version of FTP. While v3 seems to be the standard and the final RFC was never ratified, SFTP is still FTP.

Are you perhaps referring to FTPS, which is FTP with SSL/TLS added? SFTP is very, very different from FTP.

Note that SFTP is not a protocol for security transport / authentication. It doesn't do that. It assumes that you've already secured/authorized the channel with SSH. See section 1 of the RFC.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-secsh-filex...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTPS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSH_File_Transfer_Protocol

Please link to that RFC then.

They are very different. SFTP isn't even textual, nor does it have separate control and data channels of FTP.

Are these exactly the same?:

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc959.txt

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-moonesamy-secsh-...

perhaps op meant FTPS?