Secure ShellFish – SSH and SFTP Storage for iOS | Hacker News Reader

Secure ShellFish – SSH and SFTP Storage for iOS

apps.apple.com

108 pointstambourine_man40 comments

“The app contains no crash reporting or analytics frameworks with the exception of the beta version that uses HockeyApp for crash reporting.” https://secureshellfish.app/privacy.html

More apps need to have a policy like this!

I need proof first. Seen too many apps call home that say they don’t.

I've found this developer to be trustworthy, has a good track record with his git app. I'd be surprised if he would make this claim if it were untrue... it could easily be proven wrong by anyone using Charles proxy.

I'm the developer of Secure ShellFish.

You could use something like Charles for iOS to see that it doesn't connect to anything except the servers you configure.

That's not perfect btw, many apps today are using websockets (e.g. https://github.com/daltoniam/Starscream) to connect upstream and they bypass iOS/Android proxy settings entirely with no way for http based mitms to see that traffic.

Gotta fall back to wireshark for 100%.

My app has a similar policy: https://easygit.app/privacy/

It even has the sandbox entitlements to prove it.

notably, this is the developer behind Working Copy (https://workingcopyapp.com/), which Does Not Suck (tm).

Working Copy is an amazing app. I'm pretty excited to try/buy this just because I know they made quality stuff.

Working Copy is the best developer app I've ever bought on iOS.

Big fan of Working Copy. Seeing that in the portfolio made this an easy app to install, for me.

yeah. i was dubious and then i saw the name and felt reassured. Already bought the onetime IaP

MacStories also has a nice review: https://www.macstories.net/reviews/secure-shellfish-review-a...

Just yesterday I was designing something on my iPad Pro and had to save it to Local Storage (which is another great app, btw) only to use Blink to scp it over. SCP in the end didn't work (in Blink) with key authentication, so I had to resort to https://transfer.sh/

Complex, and this might make it a lot simpler. Thanks!

While i use SFTP a lot using sshfs, it is a terrible storage solution in general. If you don't know, SSH does its own flow control on top of TCP (that is, you have TCP flow control outside the SSH sleeve and SSH flow control inside it). The result is SFTP often bogs down and has dismal transfer rates. You can do much better using e.g. WebDAV and dav2fs, which lets you use https to authenticate and transfer.

suggest an app. My daughter has an iphone and my kids use ipads for school. My biggest problem is their inability to backup to my linux server, or grab stuff easily off my samba share folder.

Dropbox?

Dropbox is cloud, I want to talk to my own server.

I'd suggest waiting until iOS 13 for native SMB support.

This is going to be huge. And amazing that it took so long

ftps not an option? Just too much less convenient (more set-up) than sftp, I'm guessing? I've not had great experience with WebDAV but maybe it's just the implementations I've used.

Are you aware of any iOS apps that offer similar functionality but for WebDAV?

The ones I’ve seen either don’t support the Files Provider extension (ie integration with the Files app) or they have other weird behaviour that makes them less than ideal.

It would be cool if it could import keys from clipboard. I’ve tried to export my existing keys from Shelly and found out that I’ll have to write them to an iCloud file before importing them.

But overall this is great. I’m already a happy working copy customer.

Oh wait my bad aparently it does. I’ve exported a key without password to clipboard in my iPad and the button text changed from “import from clipboard”. I think I’ve accidentally exported the pubkey instead. My bad.

I might be able to get rid of Dropbox with this...

I did! I'm using ResilioSync to synchronize across devices, including a cheap Hetzner server with a 6TB harddrive, and then use Secure ShellFish to access that server from iOS devices (while ResilioSync does have an iOS app, that one is too buggy to be useable)

How much is the 6TB Hetzner machine?

about $25 per month, depending on the current EUR/USD conversion rate. It's a machine from their "server auction" (https://www.hetzner.com/sb)

can't tell if this comment is in earnest or if it's another dig at the infamous top comment[1] for dropbox's HN launch announcement.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

FYI can't be found via search on ios app store app, even though the name is unique. instead, navigate to it via browser. I guess b/c it was released just today?

I've been wishing for a long time that Auristor (AFS) on ios would work with the Files app, but sadly it doesn't. Making it less than useful.

For personal-only use, this is far easier anyway.

In my experience it can take 1-2 days for the AppStore to index a newly released app.

Which seems crazy. But, yeah.

Also can do a search for "Working Copy", tap that app, then tap the button to show more from the same developer.

Hmm. The lack of any kind of user-accessible local filesystem is one thing that makes me not prefer iOS.

But it's a real puzzler: is this really a brand new implementation of the ssh protocol? I know I'd feel a LOT better knowing that it used OpenSSH.

According to the About screen in the app, it uses libssh2.

Is that the reason for supporting only rsa keys?

ShellFish developer here. Recently libssh2 1.9 was released with support for modern ssh key types, but I need to do some extra work to calculate public key from private keys that depend on each key type.

I just really wanted to release a first version and more key types will be coming soon.

Thanks, I am looking forward to ed25519 support as RSA and DSA are considered too weak [1], [2].

[1] https://blog.g3rt.nl/upgrade-your-ssh-keys.html

[2] https://latacora.micro.blog/the-default-openssh/

This looks really great, bought Pro already and looking forward to seeing it evolve. Could I please put in a request for krypt.co key support?

Does this integrate with the native cloud file manager for iOS?

If you're asking whether the server directories appear in the Files app, then yes, they do.

More info - https://secureshellfish.app/

Well, Panic’s Transmit is EOL, it’s good to have replacements, although this does not do S3 (yet).

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