Diplomat MFT
SFTP Server

SFTP Server Gateway Diagram

What is an SFTP Server and Why do You Need One?

An SFTP Server is software that you deploy in an Internet-facing location so that you can host or receive files for secure file exchanges with your clients, customers, suppliers, and other business partners.  External entities connect to your server using any standard SFTP client, using strong authentication and the highest levels of security.  SFTP is the best choice for file exchanges because it supports the highest levels of security for one- or two-factor authentication, data encryption, and integrity verification.  SFTP is also a universal protocol, available on any platform from Windows, Linux, and MacOS to mainframes, IoT, and cloud storage providers.  Furthermore, SFTP is a firewall-friendly protocol, requiring only one hole in the firewall to support all file transfer operations (no more headaches with FTP port ranges!).

An SFTP server provides assurances that an organization’s file exchanges with external parties will be handled  securely across any netwrok  by using the strongest cryptography available to prevent – interception or manipulation by malicious actors via man-in-the-middle attacks.

Coviant Software offers an SFTP server option as a part of the Diplomat MFT family of products. Our SFTP server provides out-of-the-box no-code file transfer process automation, PGP encryption, compression operations, enterprise-grade scalability to support organizations of any size with secure file transfers of any volume, and web-based administration with an easy to navigate user interface.

When combined with our Coviant Software Edge Gateway, the SFTP Server  can remain in your secure back-end network, with the Edge Gateway securely brokering SFTP traffic from your DMZ to the back-end network without requiring any inbound holes in your back-end firewall.  This ensures that no data remains in the DMZ, and all authentication and access control is securely managed by your back-end systems. This defense-in-depth approach significantly increases your company’s security posture.

Furthermore, when combined with the award-winning no-code Diplomat MFT automation platform, the files exchanged with our Diplomat SFTP Server can be automatically PGP encrypted or decrypted; ZIP compressed or decompressed; and/or transferred to the internal or cloud storage systems where they need to go for integration or consumption.  The entire process for file exchanges — send, receive, host, and retrieve — are handled by the Diplomat MFT platform with visibility, management, auditing, and alerting built in.

An SFTP server supports information security and data privacy compliance programs such as HIPAA / HITECH, SOX, GLBA, GDPR, DPA, and PCI-DSS, as well as business-to-business file transfers requiring compliance with organizational standards.

 

A Changing Industry Landscape

Recent mergers and acquisitions have reduced choice, increased costs, and decreased support for secure, managed file transfer systems. Yet, while other vendors exit the market, Coviant Software has increased its commitment to you with new products and updated features. And we don’t nickel-and-dime you with hidden costs. Our price is low and we don’t charge extra for modules, product bundles, or usage tolling.

Data security is a top priority

Diplomat MFT helps keep your most sensitive files secure with built-in encryption and process automation that minimizes the risk of human error. And we complement your security and privacy compliance programs with full auditability. If you are looking for a managed file transfer platform, or need a change from your current platform, take a look at Coviant Software.

The Most Robust Enterprise MFT Solution

Coviant Software’s Diplomat MFT SFTP Server is an enterprise-grade SFTP server designed to meet the needs of organizations of any size with minimal customization and with a simple, intuitive interface.
 
For less than $9,000—less than half the cost of competitive products—organizations can get a full-featured, robust, and secure enterprise MFT solution with all components needed to manage your most sensitive files, including gateway, SFTP server, and process automation. Diplomat MFT integrates in minutes and boasts a simple user interface, as well as workflow templates to streamline the onboarding of your trading partners.

SFTP Server Features

Out of the Box Automation
SFTP and PGP encryption

Security enabled through SFTP and PGP encryption.

Web-Based Administration
Our simple to use, web-based administration interface makes this product easy to operate. Supports all modern browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari.
Fully Scalable
Scalable to support organizations of any size.

Technical Specifications

Components & Platforms

DIPLOMAT MFT SERVICE – 64-bit
• Windows Server 2012 R2 through 2022
• Linux (glibc 2.5 or higher)

DIPLOMAT MFT SCRIPTING AGENT – 64-bit
• Any system supporting Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.8 or higher

DIPLOMAT REMOTE AGENT – 64-bit
• Windows 10
• Windows Server 2008 R2 through 2022
• Linux (glibc 2.5 or higher)

DIPLOMAT MFT WEB ADMIN
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Edge
• Safari

File Transfer Protocols
  • SFTP
OpenPGP Encryption

SYMMETRIC ALGORITHMS

  • AES (up to 256-bit keys)
  • Blowfish (up to 448-bit keys)
  • CAST5
  • DES (56-bit keys)1
  • IDEA (128-bit keys)1
  • Safer (128-bit keys)1
  • Triple DES (56-bit keys)
  • Twofish (up to 256-bit keys)1

ASYMMETRIC ALGORITHMS

  • DSA (1024-bit key only)
  • El Gamal (up to 4096-bit keys)
  • RSA (up to 4096-bit keys)

HASH ALGORITHMS

  • MD21, MD5
  • RIPEMD-160
  • SHA-512, SHA-384, SHA-256, SHA-224, SHA-1

1 Only supports decrypting existing messages encrypted with algorithm or encrypting to existing keys specifying algorithm as preferred cipher.

OpenPGP Interoperability
  • McAfee® E-business Server v8.0 or later
  • Symantec® PGP Command Line v9.0 or later
  • Any other OpenPGP-compliant product
Diplomat MFT SFTP Server & Edge Gateway Video Transcript

Hi. In this video, I will walk you through the installation and configuration of the Coviant Software Edge Gateway, and the diplomat MFT server. For the purposes of this demo, I will be using this single virtual machine that I host in Azure. In a real-world environment, you would put your edge gateway into a DMZ where your servers and external mail servers are, for example, and the Diplomat MFT would be on a secure backend network.

The magic of the edge gateway is that external parties can connect over SFTP to your diplomat MFT server in the back end without requiring any inbound holes in the firewall. So in my example here, we can see that I am allowing Port 2112 in from external, uh, from the public facing internet into my Azure virtual machine.

This will be where I host the SFTP services in the DMZ. Right, so here I have my machine up and running. Let me show you a quick diagram of what we’re going to be doing today. Although this is on one physical machine. For purposes of this demo, this is effectively the solution architecture that we’re talking about inside the internet facing DMZ.

I will be installing the edge gateway. Alongside other internet facing services like mail servers, web servers, et cetera. In this case, I’m exposing port 2112 to the internet where my customers, clients, suppliers, and partners can use their SFTP client represented by the laptop on the left, connect over port 2112 to SFTP.

And what happens is it is magically brokered to the backend sftp server back here, coviant software Diplomat. MFT and the SFTP server are in your trusted network. I have my SFTP server on the back end listening to port 22, the standard SFTP port, just to show you that it’s not connecting directly to it. And what’s going to happen is when these two are configured, the SFTP Server will reach an outbound connection to the Edge gateway over port 26841.

By default, it’s configurable, and that establishes what we refer to as the peer notification channe,l over which messages are passed back and forth. For example, when a client comes in requesting an SFTP connection, it will send a message back over that bidirectional channel. Even though it requires no inbound holes in the firewall, it will say, here comes a connected client.

At that point, SFTP server reaches out over the data port 7638 to establish another socket. And then the Edge Gateway simply brokers the traffic from the client to the server. Never decrypting it, never inspecting it, never changing it. So no secure data ever is visible or stored inside the DMZ. All right, so that’s the architecture.

Let’s see how it works.

Step one is you download and install the Diplomat server. Diplomat MFT server, and the Edge Gateway, which I have done here, and they’re already installed. You can see when I install them. I’ve got two new services, my service control manager, Edge Gateway, and in this case Diplomat trial. Or if you bought a license, it would be Diplomat MFT 64.

It’s very important that before you start the service, go ahead and assign it a log on account. In this case, I use a local system that I comically refer to as Booker, but go to your log on tab and pick a local account. That way you can control the access to the data that these services get to, through that account.

For example, the program files folder or the program data folder. All right, so I’ve got both of these installed changes, user account. Now I can start them. So I’ll start one and the other, and then we’ll see how they are configured. So they’re starting up, they’re both running. Let’s start with the Edge Gateway.

If I install the Edge Gateway on a machine inside my DMZ, I’ve got to configure it so that, uh, I choose the ports over which it listens for external connections and these ports right here, it’s fundamentally all you have to do. So let’s go to the Edge Gateway. Uh, by the way, when you install it, you do get shortcuts installed on your desktop or you can just bookmark it.

It’s a web-based administration utility. By default the admin UI for the Edge gateway is on Port 9273. Note that this is plain text, not HTTPS, and that is because we only listen to local hosts. You can only access the server, through local host or 127 not internet accessible. It’s a very lightweight, set and forget kind of configurations.

So rather than mucking with SSL certificate and stuff, you just connect to it locally. No traffic ever leaves the box. And here we’ll log in. Default password is going to be diplomat, all lowercase. And when you log in the first time, you can change that password here. All right, so the configuration screen on the left-hand side, much like our diagram is, what are you listening to SFTP connections for?

So in this case, I choose the IP address that I want to listen. If I listen to Lo, local Host, external connections won’t be able to reach me. So it’s usually an IP address or all incoming. In a secure environment, you’re going to separate, across two network cards, right? So you’re going to have a network card on this side with its own IP address that listens to inbound connections and a network card on this side that listens for connections from the secure backend network to isolate those two and protect them from firewall access, right? So I’m listening on this IP address. I’m listening to port 2112 for SFTP, and over on the right hand side, different network card in this case. To simplify it, I’m just listening to all incoming. And these are my ports, like illustrated in the diagram.

That’s the configuration to make it work. There are a few other things you can do, if you configure. Which is one server. This part doesn’t really matter, but it, let’s say you have a failover mechanism, or you purchase two edge gateways combined with two Diplomat MFTs on the back end. Then you can use round robin.

So imagine this diagram with another SFTP server for resiliency and another Edge Gateway. Both SFTP servers can connect to this edge gateway. And edge gateway has the policy of saying, how do you want me to direct traffic? It’s either round robin. Which directs traffic from clients to a specific server and then goes to the next one and just rotates between them.

Except I’m going to use sticky sessions, which means an incoming client based upon their IP address. If they make multiple connections, then they will all go to the same Target SFTP server based upon that IP Connection. That way if there’s a particular user using FileZilla, when SCP or some utility, it opens multiple connections.

It makes them all go to the same destination, makes things easier. Alternatively, you can have a failover strategy. So for example, all traffic goes to this SFTP server, unless such time is it’s down, and if I can’t reach that server, it’s not connected. I will go to whatever backup SFTP server you provide me, can be anywhere, can be in a different Data Center as long it has, as it has a relatable IP address from the back end to this Edge Gateway.

And in so doing, I will continue to direct traffic there and mark this as the new one, as the primary. And it’s up to you to kind of redirect it back at your convenience. So in this case, you would have a different IP address, right? So, I would have another connection coming in, or I know that it’s the machine located at 10.0.1.134.

So this is my primary but fail over. In this case, easiest, just round rob and leave at default. You can also have IP access controls on this backend network to make sure that these open ports on the firewall are only connectable by certain IP addresses. It’s one or the other. It’s allow everything except you blacklist something else

So in this case, I allow everything except the following, or I deny everything except the following. So this becomes the white list of the only one allowed through. Easiest thing is to secure your firewalls on the back end, in the front end, so that you control it at a firewall level. But this provides additional software protection.

Okay and the rest shows you here is active status. You can leave this window open. We can see that I’ve got one Diplomat MFT connected to me, happens to be the one on local host. I see it right here. And it currently has no active connections, no file transfer, but a screen, it’s good to go. All right, so that’s Edge Gateway configuration.

Now let’s look at Diplomat MFT. Again, I launched the shortcut. I log in. Default password is diplomat. Until you change it. And here’s our diplomat MFT server. When you set up an SFTP server, your first step is to create SSH key pair to strongly identify your SFTP server. So right click on key pairs, create key pair, fill out the values.

In this case, I’ve already done that, so I can now go to SFTP, I’m sorry, settings SFTP server. Notice I have it enabled. I tell it to use the key pair I just created. I pick the root folder where all my SFTP server users will be housed by default. I can’t go above that level. Everything is there or lower in the directory tree.

And if you wish, you can use a UNC path. So if you could put servers, zero one data SFTP, for example, just make sure that the user account under which the service is running has access to this UNC path. Let me undo that. So everyone’s located here. These are the default permissions for the user. these are the pass authentication policies, et cetera.

You can even go to advanced settings to pick ciphers, hashes, compression, key exchange algorithms, etc. and we have a feature that allows you to delete files out of user folders that are older than X amount of days. So you don’t explode your disc space. All right, so the basic setting for SFTP server is here, and then the extended setting for Edge Gateway is right here. It’s really simple. I’m going to use the Edge Gateway. Where is the address? Now? Remember, in a real-world scenario, it would be a different machine. It’d be the IP address of this machine and your DMZ. I happen to be running both on the same machine for convenience. So it is located right here on my local machine port number.

And then what’s the identifier for this machine? This is how we can make sure that this Diplomat MFT server announces itself as this unique identifier to the edge gateway, so it can keep track of things. Once it’s on and we click save, then it makes the connection and that’s why we see this as a green connection here.

Oops, it just restarted, so it’ll take a second. All right. So what we see is that Diplomat MFT, on the back end with its SFTP Server is configured, connect this edge gateway. This edge gateway is listening on port 2112 for SFTP traffic. So now let’s finish this by logging in as an external account through port 2112 as SFTP.

And by doing so, we’ll see that it gets brokered all the way through to the backend and it can’t be directly to this back end because that’s listening on port 22. So it must be flowing through the Edge Gateway. So here we have it’s green again because the server SFTP server got its settings changed and restarted and it’s reconnected.

I’m going to drop back down here to my desktop, so I’m no longer in the virtual machine. I’m going to open FileZilla, and I have this configured already under my Azure Edge Gateway test.

You can see it’s connecting to that IP address, I’m sorry, this domain name at Port 2112, and here’s the folders that we see, so let’s double check that. It’s what it should be. Remember that under my SFTP Server,

I have this as the root, so we’ll see what the contents of this. And under my SFTP users, I have configured this. So I have one user named Foo. Home folder is foo. So that’s a sub folder of the route and they can’t go any higher than that. So if I look inside the Foo folder, this is what belongs to foo. And sure enough basic rollout that’s here.

And if I transfer files from my local machine up to that Azure machine through the Edge Gateway, We can see that some of ’em are still in progress, but here they go. They’re all up on the remote site, and if I look inside my actual physical machine, here they are here. All right, so that’s the overview of installation and configuration of the Edge Gateway and the Diplomat MFT SFTP server.

So you can protect your data from clients, customers, partners, and suppliers flowing through your internet accessible dmz. And securely onto the back end without requiring any inbound holes in the firewall. Thank you very much.

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Explore our most popular Diplomat MFT editions for the most advanced features and control of any managed file transfer solution.

{We are using the application to transfer ACH files to the banks. We also really like the ease of implementation and the great support we got from the team at Coviant.
5
Dennis C. Sr Busines Analyst in US
"Easy to Use with Great Customer Support"
{Ease of use - Efficient - Adapts to different industries - Friendly teamThis software allows me to sleep at night, trusting that all of the files I send with sensitive information will be secure!
5
Verified Reviewer
"Powerful Program!"
{We're using Diplomat to move PGP encrypted payment files to various banking providers using SFTP. Nice browser interface. Templated workflows to simplify SFTP and PGP automation. Best priced solution for the functionality provided.
5
John A, Director in UK
"Managed file transfer software at a reasonable price"
{Very easy to use, great customer service, and does everything we need it to do. Everything is as expected. I do not have anything that I dislike about the product.
5
Kyle M. Systems Administrator in US
"Very easy to use & great customer service"
{Helped consolidate all file transfers using various other tools and automate manual activities into one centralized enterprise MFT. Support has been outstanding with product.
5
Sr Manager EDI/Encounters in US
5 Stars for Diplomat MFT
{We used Coviant Diplomat to send Secure file transfer to Bank and receive back acknowledgment files. With the help from Software Engineer, the initial set up was rather quick. The stabilization period took a bit of time to work through all the different scenarios. Overall, it is a quality and cost-effective option for our purpose.
5
Sr. Manager, SAP/ERP Applications in Canada
"Cost effective option to automate Secure file transfer"
{Coviant does a great job supporting their product. That is increasingly rare these days. Of all of the products we use in our enterprise Diplomat is one we can get immediate support for in the event that we have any questions or issues.
5
Scott J. Sr Engineer, Applications in US
"Excellent Customer Support & Responsiveness"
{Coviant does a great job supporting their product. That is increasingly rare these days. Of all of the products we use in our enterprise Diplomat is one we can get immediate support for in the event that we have any questions or issues.
5
Sr Engineer, Applications in US
"Excellent customer support & responsiveness"
{Kicked the tires with the trial version. Liked what I saw. Liked that Coviant was there every step of the way to answer questions. Customer Support is handled by the company, not outsourced.
5
Principal in US
"Strong Feature Set, Great Value"
{Our client didn't want to be in the position of having unsupported software for too long and it's almost been six months since RepliWeb's End of Life and end of support for that software. We had a great experience from the first initial call. It was refreshing to deal with a team that were honest but confident in their solution. They always had time to answer our questions and would update us about the development of v9.1.
5
Sean Mullins, Director
"Ideal RepliWeb MFT Replacement"

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