FTP with SSL/TLS

[Dave Cragg]

On 22 Aug 2006, at 21:24, Jan Schenkel wrote:

> --- William de Smet <wdesmet at wanadoo.nl> wrote:
>> Hi there,
>>
>> I just thought to make a small easy FTP app so the
>> teachers on the
>> school I work (two locations in two different
>> cities) could FTP
>> documents to the other location.
>> The FTP however needs SSL/TLS and I don't know how
>> to do that!
>
> Hi William,
>
> The SFTP protocol is a different protocol from FTP -
> it's not just a matter of opening a secure socket
> connection.
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSH_file_transfer_protocol>
>
> While this might be an interesting project if you want
> to learn more about socket communication, it might be
> better to file a feature request in Bugzilla, so
> LibURL guru Dave Cragg can build it for you ;-)

FTP over SSL/TLS is different from SFTP (FTP over SSH), I believe.  
It's a while since I looked at this, but I think FTP over SSL/TLS  
would probably be easier to implement. However, I think the engine  
still needs a way to negotiate a secure connection (secure  
handshake??) over an existing non-secure connection before this could  
be implemented in libUrl. On the other hand, SFTP seems to be more  
widely supported by servers.

Does anyone know if curl can be used for this?

Cheers
Dave