FTP - Why is This Insecure Protocol Still Popular?

The earliest draft for the file transfer protocol was published as early as 1971 and the final version of the FTP protocol was published in 1985 as RFC 959. Even after the development of several extensions to support secure transfer in 1997, it is still common to see organizations continue to use FTP. There are several reasons for this.

First of all, FTP has become a universal standard for transferring files. All operating systems, including mainframes and minicomputers of a bygone era, support FTP. In most cases, the software that is needed to transfer files using FTP is available as part of the installed operating system. For archaic and little used operating systems, data transfer software that makes use of modern public key encryption to securely transfer files may not even be available. A system administrator who has to work with these systems has no choice but to continue to use FTP.

Secondly, the protocol supports anonymous FTP. Many repositories want to make files freely available to the general public. A user can simply login to these sites and transfer files without having to provide a password. Most of these sites are maintained by universities or large corporations and accept the user email address as the password. For these sites, secure file transfer is unnecessary because there is nothing to hide or protect. These sites are expected to continue operating using regular insecure FTP.

Finally, there is a computational and data overhead associated with secure data transfer. This is because each byte of data in the file to be transferred needs to be encrypted using public key encryption algorithms. This can cause slowdown in the data transfer rate. In corporate and other organizational intranets that have already been protected from the outside world by a firewall, it may be more efficient to allow regular insecure file transfers inside of the intranet.

In conclusion, there are many secure transfer mechanisms available today such as FTPS and SFTP that can encrypt file transfers using public key encryption and prevent data from being intercepted or corrupted. However, the original FTP mechanism that has been in existence decades earlier will continue to play an important role in facilitating file transfer and system administrators still need to be prepared to support it when appropriate.

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