1. Introduction

1.1. What is MySecureShell?

MySecureShell is a solution which has been made to bring more features to sftp/scp protocol given by OpenSSH. By default, OpenSSH brings a lot of liberty to connected users which imply to trust in your users. The goal of MySecureShell is to offer the power and security of OpenSSH, with enhanced features (like ACL) to restrict connected users.

MySecureShell was created because of the lack of file transfer features in OpenSSH. OpenSSH was not designed as a file transfer solution, that’s why we made MySecureShell.

MySecureShell is not a patch for OpenSSH, it’s a shell for users. It has the advantage to:

  • Avoid including security holes in OpenSSH
  • No dependency on against an OpenSSH version
  • No OpenSSH recompilation is required

So MySecureShell remains easy to install, secure and easy to configure.

1.2. Why SFTP and not FTP?

If you’re wondering why you should take MySecureShell as an SFTP server instead of a classical FTP, there are several reasons:

  1. You do not have to open some dedicated firewall ports for file transfers
  2. You are using one of the most used and secure protocol (SSH)
  3. You do not have to manage SSL certificates to guaranty the security
  4. As easy to use as a classical FTP server
  5. As many or more features that you can find on any classical FTP servers
  6. Easy to install, configure, maintain and use

1.3. What are MySecureShell’s SFTP new features to OpenSSH

Is MySecureShell really add enhanced features to OpenSSH sftp? Yes! Here is a sample of features of what MySecureShell is able to give:

  • Bandwidth control
  • Only authorized files and folders can be shown
  • Advanced logging information
  • ACL can be made with IP/Usernam/Groups/VirtualHost/…
  • Confined environments (chroot, which is also available in the latests version of OpenSSH)
  • Restrict users to have sftp only (shell access is disabled by default)
  • And more…

1.4. Which Operating Systems are compatible with MySecureShell?

MySecureShell has been developed to work on several types of Operating Systems like Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, BSD and Windows (with Cygwin).

We unfortunately do not package MySecureShell for all platforms but we do our best to bring binary packages to most used/common Operating System for production usage like:

If binary packages are not available for your system, we do our best to make them easily installable with scripts shell and Makefiles.