Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)

The Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) is a de facto industry standard for secure file transfers, and it is natively supported by the Tectia client/server solution.

SFTP allows secure copying, moving, editing, and removing of files over TCP/IP networks. Scripted file transfers between enterprise servers can be secured by using the Tectia command-line SFTP and SCP (Secure Copy) tools with automated and ad hoc file transfers. For secure interactive file transfers, Windows users have the Tectia Secure File Transfer GUI.

Tectia supports the legacy OpenSSH SCP implementation used by default in OpenSSH version 8 and below for easy migration of OpenSSH environments to Tectia, creating a smoother transition to ensure seamless connectivity during the migration period.

SFTP features include:

File transfer resume

The file transfer resume feature allows resuming interrupted file transfers instead of restarting the whole operation. The file transfer resume uses file hashing to determine the point of resume. For increased performance, you can apply the checkpoint/restart mechanism for optimum handling of interruptions in large file transfers.

File integrity check

Tectia supports in SFTP digest command that can be used to check the hash of the remote or local file on Unix and Windows. This is particularly useful if users are restricted to SFTP services only in Tectia Server configuration.

Easy SFTP restrictions

Tectia Server can be easily configured with subsystem chrooting on Unix platforms to confine users to a specific directory tree (e.g., home directory or user-specific directly on a network share) for added security and ease of use. Tectia supports versatile file system permissions so that it is possible to chroot for example read-only download users to a user-specific directory and upload user(s) to the parent directory so that root-privileges are not required for maintaining downloadable files.

On Windows Server, SFTP access to the file system is through virtual folders that provide additional layer to limit user access compared to what the operating system itself provides. Each SFTP user can be limited to multiple local folders or folders on network shares that can be named descriptively independent from the file system folder name.