Fastest protocol, SSH, SSHFS, VPN, TLS/SSL

Akonbobot · 05-11-2007, 08:53 PM

Hi.

Which is the fastest encryption/decryption for secure ftp transfers?
VPN vs. SSH vs. SSHFS vs. TLS/SSL

Can someone please direct me to where I can read a decent
review of the speed differences for purposes of choosing
an encryption strategy ?

I'm getting miserable speeds on the LAN using SSH v2, using
secure SFTP for file transfers.

I'd eventually like to access via remote connection, but am not
sure which protocol will deliver the best transfer rates.

Thank you.
Akonbobot

macemoneta · 05-12-2007, 02:49 AM

Read 'man sftp'; you have a choice of encryption ciphers. A good fast cipher is blowfish, so try:

sftp -o Cipher=blowfish user@host

Akonbobot · 05-12-2007, 12:21 PM

Thanks, I'm currently using SFTP via SSH v2 and blowfish... it's too
slow.

I'd like to determine which connection is going to be speediest
when doing secure ftp transfers;

VPN, SSH, SSHFS, or TLS/SSL

Which is speediest ?

Thank you.
Akonbobot

macemoneta · 05-12-2007, 01:23 PM

You're mixing applications with ciphers. The application has little impact; most of the work is in the cipher. If your CPU (and the CPU on the remote side) are not maxing out at 100%, then the cipher and the application are not your bottleneck. You are being bandwidth limited. In that case, you can add compression, to trade CPU for bandwidth:

sftp -C -o Cipher=blowfish user@host

In the end, you can only optimize a limited resource so much.

Akonbobot · 05-12-2007, 08:20 PM

Thank you for your input.

Is this true...

If I use a VPN, SSH, SSHFS, TLS/SSL connection they are all possess the same capacity for speed when I wish to ftp files through?

The bottleneck will be in the cipher used only ?

Thank you.
Akonbobot