Comparative Study of Secure File Transfer Mechanisms: File Transfer Protocol Over SSL (FTPS), Secure Shell File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)

File transfer has been an essential process over huge period of time. These files which are being transferred may contain textual data, graphical data or multimedia files with audio or video content. To make this transfer of files happen, a very well-established protocol called File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is been developed in the 1980s to allow two computers to transfer files over the internet. But FTP in its basic form is not secure as the conversation between client and server is performed in plain text�all communication between the two parties is sent unprotected, over the internet. To overcome limitations of FTP, two mechanisms to secure file transfer are been introduced; one is “Secure Shell File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)� and the other is “File Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer (FTPS)�. Though SFTP and FTPS are the two terms which are often confused with each other, but they differ in many aspects. So motive of this paper is to study how SFTP and FTPS discriminate from each other through their functionalities and mode of operations and to conclude which one is better than other in various aspects.