The FTP standard is 40 years old.
One of the key protocols of the Internet FTP (file transfer protocol) on Saturday celebrated its 40th anniversary. MIT student Abhay Bushan published the first specifications of RFC 114 on April 16, 1971, long before the appearance of HTTP and even three years before TCP ( RFC 793 )!
A simple standard for copying files over the years has begun to support more complex models of control, compatibility, and security (there are now various extensions). Surprisingly, four decades later, FTP cannot be called obsolete and is still quite widely used. Even with P2P technology, the old man stands up to the competition. What is only one function FXP , adopted in 1985, with which FTP can directly copy files from one remote server to another. For its time, it was very cool.
For forty years, FTP has managed to resist numerous competitors, including fsp, scp, rsync, uucp, WAIS, gopher and ftpmail, although some of them exceeded FTP in a number of parameters and had a better interface.
The original RFC 114 was replaced by the standard RFC 765 (June 1980), and then RFC 959 (October 1985), which is still valid with regard to additions that relate to support for IPv6 and SSL / TLS.
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Support for cryptographic protocols was needed to eliminate the weakest point of FTP: initially, he could not encrypt traffic and all data, including names, passwords and commands, were transmitted in clear text and easily intercepted by a sniffer. One of the solutions to this problem is tunneling through SSH or using cryptographic protocols TLS and SSL, which is stipulated in the FTPS standard (FTP Secure or FTP-SSL), described in RFC 2228 .
FTP does not even think of leaving the stage and continues to evolve. For example, the extensions of draft-ietf-ftpext2-hash on using hashes to check the integrity of files and draft-peterson-streamlined-ftp-command-extensions with a whole list of additional commands, including a request for reduced copies of images, operations with entire branches of directories, are discussed. with subfolders, request available disk space, folder size and its contents.
A simple standard for copying files over the years has begun to support more complex models of control, compatibility, and security (there are now various extensions). Surprisingly, four decades later, FTP cannot be called obsolete and is still quite widely used. Even with P2P technology, the old man stands up to the competition. What is only one function FXP , adopted in 1985, with which FTP can directly copy files from one remote server to another. For its time, it was very cool.
For forty years, FTP has managed to resist numerous competitors, including fsp, scp, rsync, uucp, WAIS, gopher and ftpmail, although some of them exceeded FTP in a number of parameters and had a better interface.
The original RFC 114 was replaced by the standard RFC 765 (June 1980), and then RFC 959 (October 1985), which is still valid with regard to additions that relate to support for IPv6 and SSL / TLS.
')
Support for cryptographic protocols was needed to eliminate the weakest point of FTP: initially, he could not encrypt traffic and all data, including names, passwords and commands, were transmitted in clear text and easily intercepted by a sniffer. One of the solutions to this problem is tunneling through SSH or using cryptographic protocols TLS and SSL, which is stipulated in the FTPS standard (FTP Secure or FTP-SSL), described in RFC 2228 .
FTP does not even think of leaving the stage and continues to evolve. For example, the extensions of draft-ietf-ftpext2-hash on using hashes to check the integrity of files and draft-peterson-streamlined-ftp-command-extensions with a whole list of additional commands, including a request for reduced copies of images, operations with entire branches of directories, are discussed. with subfolders, request available disk space, folder size and its contents.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/117721/
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