Sending Files w/o Sending Clear Passwords?

Ambush_Bug asks: "I've done some googling around, but to no avail. I'm wondering if the Slashdot knows of a remote login protocol which exists in security space somewhere between ssh & rsh/ftp/telnet. Basically, the point is that I don't care if my data are encrypted, but I'd rather not send my password around as plaintext. I'm sending extremely large astronomical images which don't compress very well (noisy backgrounds...) and sftp is just too slow, but our sysadmin isn't fond of rcp, ftp and the like. Is there something in between?"

Comments

Try a faster cipher

[semanticgap]

Sftp uses ssh as the transport. Chances are your ssh configuration defaults to 3des which is painfully slow, you might do better by specifying blowfish as your cipher, or if you are really lucky, your sysadmin has compiled ssh with "none" cipher enabled (but my guess is you are not so lucky, even though ssh with none as cipher addresses your problem precisely - passwords are encrypted, and the rest isn't).

To tell sftp to tell ssh to use blowfish I believe you need "sftp -oCipher=blowfish"