embedded secure file transfer (open[ssl|ssh], sftp, scp?)

From: Matt Garman (garman@raw-sewage.bogus)
Date: 02/26/03 

From: Matt Garman <garman@raw-sewage.bogus>
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 14:21:44 GMT

In my company, we distribute some applications developed in-house. To
aid the support staff, the programs include functionality to
automatically tar and compress the user's data files, then send this
arcthive to a centralized FTP site. We have both Windows and Unix
versions of our homegrown apps.

Since some of this information may have sensitive content, we would
like to encrypt the data before transport. But, for the sake of the
user AND support staff, we would like to keep this easy-to-use (read:
one button click) "send to support" function.

My question is, what would be involved in embedding OpenSSH or OpenSSL
functionality into our software? For example, does the scp or sftp
portion of OpenSSH have it's own API? I *know* this centralized FTP
server already runs SSH. Or, I'm also thinking that our centralized
FTP server could run Apache+SSL, and we could embed functionality for
automated HTTP uploads over SSL into our program.

Basically, I'm trying to explore the various alternatives here, and
trying to get a feel for the effort involved in implementing them.

Thanks for any advice/ideas/suggestions!

Matt 

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