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FTP Resources Will Be Marked Not Secure in Chrome Starting Later This Year (google.com)

Posted by msmash on from the tightening-bolts dept.

Google engineer Mike West writes: As part of our ongoing effort to accurately communicate the transport security status of a given page, we're planning to label resources delivered over the FTP protocol as "Not secure", beginning in Chrome 63 (sometime around December, 2017). We didn't include FTP in our original plan, but unfortunately its security properties are actually marginally worse than HTTP (delivered in plaintext without the potential of an HSTS-like upgrade). Given that FTP's usage is hovering around 0.0026% of top-level navigations over the last month, and the real risk to users presented by non-secure transport, labeling it as such seems appropriate. We'd encourage developers to follow the example of the linux kernel archives by migrating public-facing downloads (especially executables!) from FTP to HTTPS.

1 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Re:As someone who has to administer firewalls... by tlhIngan · · Score: 4, Informative

    Spoken like someone who has never looked at the FTP protocol or the code in a client or server. HTTP is far simpler to implement than FTP and, unlike FTP, is also trivial to add TLS support to, easier to scale up with CDNs, and so on. FTP hasn't been the right tool for any job for well over a decade.

    1) FTP uploads are easier to support than HTTP uploads HTTP uploads require CGI scripts to handle, and if configured wrongly, can lead to security issues (see FCC website w.r.t. comment system)

    2) FTP supports TLS -it's called FTPS (not to be confused with SFTP - the former uses FTP and initiates a TLS session, the latter uses SSH). Modern FTP clients and servers support STARTTLS as a command to initiate TLS, and they do it before the USER/PASS commands so the connection is encrypted from the get-go. Note that you need to use passive mode while doing this as most NAT gateways spy on FTP sessions to set up dynamic mappings, and TLS doesn't allow them to do it.

    3) HTTP doesn't allow for easy downloading of multiple files other than picking and saving one at a time. Sure browser extensions may try to simplify this, but in general, you can't pick a list of files and transfer that. Triply so if you want to upload multiple files - either the web page and script has to implement support or you're having to upload files one at a time. Clever javscripting can help with that, but now you're relying on user side and server side scripts and not all websites that support uploads support multiple file transfers.

    Granted, it's time for a modern upgrade to FTP that gets rid of the multiple port requirements, but HTTP is not a complete replacement for FTP. FTPS still has all the issues with FTP. SFTP is a lot better, but support is generally lacking across the board, including bypassing strict firewalls.