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ISA-tools / ISAcreator

ISAcreator is a Java desktop application which allows for the creation and editing of ISA-Tab files. Originally developed by Eamonn Maguire, with further contributions by Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran, David Johnson and Philippe Rocca-Serra (Uni. of Oxford).
http://www.isa-tools.org
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Implement secure copy in file chooser #38

Open eamonnmag opened 13 years ago

eamonnmag commented 13 years ago

Please could you implement Secure Copy (similar to WinSCP) in the File Browser/Chooser, as FTP has been disabled on all our servers due to its insecure nature; data files being linked to may contain sensitive information that the user doesn't want transmitted in the clear across the network.

eamonnmag commented 11 years ago

@sneumann I would say that this is not really what the file chooser should be doing. SCP is a protocol used to securely copy files, but to list the files is not possible unless one has access to the server you wish to copy from. So what you're asking for is a tool within the file chooser that allows the user to transfer files from some location to some folder on their local file system?

sneumann commented 11 years ago

Hi Eammon, currently the File Chooser in the Assay spreadsheet has a "Remote" tab, and allows to pull data from remote, and to use FTP for that. So I guess there is already something "...that allows the user to transfer files from some location to some folder on their local file system".

We don't use FTP in-house, so I though about an extension to use ssh/scp/sftp where the remote endpoint is something like OpenSSH (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSSH/Cookbook/SFTP)

Maybe this is already available in Java with the same, or a drop-in replacement, to the FTP library you are already using in the ISAcreator, essentially with minimum efforts.

Yours, Steffen

eamonnmag commented 11 years ago

Well, it never pulls data from the remote server. It just points to the file. When someone wishes to access that from the BII, they will have to enter their credentials to access the files. By doing this, we attempt to move security handling from something we do to something the in-house institutions are managing.