encrypted file transfer protocols compared

I like putting up some explanatory “this versus that” documents on stuff I know a little about. I’ve done things like curl vs wget, ftp vs http and http vs bittorrent in the past.

This time, I decided it was about time to do a technical comparison of the four major encrypted file transfer protocols SCP, SFTP, FTPS and HTTPS and explain how they differ in as many aspects and viewpoints as possible. I quite often get questions about how some of these compare against some of the others and why you’d use one instead of another etc. I hope this document will help people to find such answers themselves.

Of course I do mistakes and sometimes express myself in muddy ways, so your feedback and help is important. You can help me make this comparison become better!

http://daniel.haxx.se/docs/encrypted-transfer-protocols-compared.html

It’s still rough and all, but what question and comparisons between them do you miss? What mistakes have I done? What parts aren’t spelled out clear enough?

Syndicated 2009-06-29 20:54:56 from daniel.haxx.se

Rockbox Devcon 2009 Summary

The Rockbox team that gathered in Ghent for this weekend of talk, hacking and socializing (drinking beer) is caught on this group picture. Click the image for a slightly larger version. Photo by Petur.

The people on the photo

The top line from the left: amiconn, markun, bertrik, gevaerts, GodEater, AlexP, Zagor, domonoky, Bagder (me!)

The lower line from the left: kugel, pixelma, scorche, petur

We did have a 2-hour discussion session on the saturday, and I expect to post an mp3 of it later on. The short and compressed outcome in plain text is found here. Petur was a great host. The facilities were nice, the hotel was great, the food arrangements worked out perfectly. A swell weekend!

As our tradition demands, we did bring out all our targets (portable music devices that can run Rockbox or at least have some code in the Rockbox repo) to be used as building bricks to create a Tower of Rockbox.

This first picture shows that we have a pretty wide selection of players in this room:

With all those “bricks” put in an imaginative order on top of each other, the result could look something like this:

you may enjoy comparing this building with last year’s creation.

More pictures from this year can be found in Petur’s collection and gevaerts’ collection.

Syndicated 2009-06-21 20:37:22 from daniel.haxx.se

Rockbox Devcon 2009 in Ghent

In company facilities in the city of Ghent, Belgium, a fine crowd of Rockbox hackers have gathered to hack, chat, drink beer and design new stuff. Rockbox Devcon 2009 is in progress.

This year we’re entertaining the inhabitants of #rockbox and #rockbox-community with two webcam streams from ustream.tv. View both cams at once using rasher’s page.

Syndicated 2009-06-19 22:23:15 from daniel.haxx.se

libssh2 vs libssh

There are only two open source libraries for SSH that I am aware of. At least that are at the fundamental layer, written in C.

I researched the SSH library market years ago when I stuck with libssh2 as the one I thought was most promising, and since then I and others have taken it much further. The lib that I didn’t go with at that time, confusingly enough named libssh, recently came out with a new release.

Since there is now clearly two active open source SSH libraries it feels like we should help our users and potential newcomers by explaining how our projects and libraries differ. As a little teaser: one of the libraries turned out more than twice as fast as the other in my test…

While I admit to not having actually used libssh for real, I’ve read the docs and I’ve tried it a little bit. My take at a comparison is now online at:

http://libssh2.haxx.se/libssh2-vs-libssh.html

I will highly appreciate your feedback and additional things that differ between the two! The list isn’t really much to boast about as it currently looks!

Syndicated 2009-06-14 12:21:43 from daniel.haxx.se

HTTPbis at IETF75

Mark, one of the editors of the ongoing HTTPbis efforts, first mentioned that there wasn’t going to be any HTTPbis meeting on the upcoming IETF75 meeting in Stockholm July 26-31, 2009. I felt a bit sorry for that since I live in Stockholm, I’m a bit involved in the HTTPbis work and I’ve never been to a IETF meeting.

It simply must have been due to my almighty powers, but apparently two of the editors are going here anyway and there has now been a request for a HTTPbis session during the meeting.

I’m looking forward to this! Hopefully it’ll bring some fun talks on tech we care about, but also meeting cool people in real life that I never met before.

Oh, and am I the only one who can’t find the dates anywhere on ietf75.se?

Syndicated 2009-06-12 14:15:16 from daniel.haxx.se