Re: Can Unix have a batch file to securely send a file to a Unix or Windows Machine?, scp, ftp, ssh, ssl p***

From:
Date: 06/02/02 

Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2002 16:09:40 +0000 (UTC)

thus spake Peter ***:
... the goal is to provide
> file data transfer at low cost from our HP UNIX or Windows Box to 5 of
> our customers (with Windows most likely).
> The files are EDI files--just a file we need to encrypt and send via a
> scheduler or via command line/script mode (not interactive with
> someone sitting there-i.e.: unattended transfer of an encrypted file).
...
> I have heard of Secure FTP, PGP encryption, SSH, SCP and SCP, not to
> mention SSL over an HTTPS connection.

With PGP, you can encrypt the file on disk, so if anyone breaks
in your machine, they won't be able to read it. How you transfer
it to the client is entirely up to you: e-mail, FTP, HTTP. Your
client must decrypt the file in order to read it.

SSH/SCP encrypts the file before sending it out, and decrypts it
at the destination. Data encryption is transparent to you and the
client; file is stored on disk un-encrypted (well, unless you
encrypt it first as described above).

SSL'ed versions of HTTP et. al. work in the same fashion; main
difference is that there are several standard protocols that
can be SSL'ed (as opposed to one SSH protocol).

Assuming you insist on pushing data from your machine to
clients,

HTTPS is basically HTTP: web server with SSL support on your,
side and SSL'ed browsers (most are nowadays) on client side.
That doesn't really fit your requirement of pushing the file:
HTTP(S) transfers are initiated by browsers (clients).

SCP/SFTP: you need to set up SSH servers on all client machines.
I don't know of Windows versions of sshd, but you can run OpenSSH
under Cygwin.

PGP: you can use existing mechanisms, if any, to send encrypted
file out. E.g. e-mail.

Both SCP and e-mail are easily scriptable. I'm sure you could get
an e-mail client (e.g. mutt) to even PGP-encrypt the file with
the right key automagically.

Dima 

-- 
I like the US government, makes the Aussie one look less dumb and THAT is a
pretty big effort.                                               -- Craig Small