Copying files between linux machines with strong authentication but without encryption
- by Zizzencs
I'm looking for a suitable program to copy files from one linux machine to another one. The program should be able to do authentication but it should not do encryption. The reason behind the latter is the lack of CPU power to do the encryption.
I copy backups from ~70 machines to a single backup server simultaneously. The single server is an HP Proliant DL360 G7, with 10 Gbps ethernet connection and an FC storage backend that can do 4 Gbps. Through FTP I can write ~400MB/sec to the storage (that's about what I want) but through ssh with arcfour I can only do ~100MB/sec while having 100% CPU usage. That's why I want file transfers not to be encrypted.
The alternatives that I found not really suitable:
rcp: no authentication, forget it
FTP: making the authentication "secure" (at least preventing plain-text password exchange) is possible but not really easy and I haven't found a method to force any FTP daemon to encrypt the control channel (for the authentication) and not to encrypt the data channel (for data transfers)
SCP/SFTP: in farely recent ssh(d) implementations you can't turn off encryption. The best you can do is to use the arcfour cypher for the encryption but it sill uses too much CPU power for my needs.
rsync over ssh: same problems as with SCP/SFTP.
plain rsync: from the documentation of rsyncd: "The authentication protocol used in rsync is a 128 bit MD4 based challenge response system. This is fairly weak protection, though (with at least one brute-force hash-finding algorithm publicly available), so if you want really top-quality security, then I recommend that you run rsync over ssh." It's a no-go.
Is there a protocol/program that can do exactly what I want?
(A big plus would be if it could work on windows as well and/or if it would support rsync-stlye copying/synchronization (e.g. copy only the differences).)
