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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Being completely plaintext makes it unacceptable for many use cases in the modern world. It's also a touch more complicated than it needs to be for the standard use case. Binary vs. ASCII transfer mode (and ASCII is the default most of the time even though it only very rarely makes sense). Plus the whole passive vs. active mode thing. Too many footguns and no security rule it out.

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If you're running FTP as plaintext you're indeed doing it wrong, I'm not sure that that must be what GP meant. Not as if we explicitly mention (START)TLS for every other protocol that supports it.

You can't have secure FTP without a certificate and you can't have a certificate without DNS/domain names unless you want to manually add certificates around which is bad UX again.

The ideal situation would be some universal airdrop which will never happen. The next easiest solution is to use cloud storage and send a link to the other person.

Yeah, that's fair. I think FileZilla shows who signed the cert, but yeah it still gives that pop-up asking the user to decide and I haven't checked whether they verify that signer against the system CA list. Either way, that's as canon as FTP clients get and since they don't have it, indeed it's mostly opportunistic encryption. (Not that relying on the CA system rather than TOFU'ing or sharing a fingerprint is without problems of its own, but that's a discussion for another thread.)

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