Problem with special characters in password using SFTP

ThorstenW · 01-31-2016, 03:35 AM

Hello,

I'm just at day 2 of my evaluation period. I'm testing everything before buying FlashFXP.

And I'm pretty sure that I have found a bug.

I use special characters in my passwords, but SSHD auth.log shows me failed logins (password wrong). The server uses UTF-8 and I already tried to force UTF-8 in site manager -> options -> character set. I think FlashFXP try to switch to UTF-8 after the login, but not for login itself. All my sites uses SFTP over SSH.

Also I found out that some of the special characters are stored with HTML entities. If I export my sites and have a look at the passwords, it will show "& g t ;" (without the spaces) instead of ">" - that's just an example there are more characters that are stored wrong.

BTW: With FileZilla everything works fine.

Is there a chance to fix this quickly? I really want to use FlashFXP in the future but using passwords without special characters is not an option for me.

Greetings from Germany,

Thorsten

bigstar · 01-31-2016, 09:48 PM

By special characters are you referring to symbols?

Such as !@#$%^&*()[]{};':",./<>?

If so there should not be any issues using these characters in FlashFXP.

When you export a site any field that contains special characters are automatically escaped by the xml library, and when importing xml the escaped characters are transformed back to their actual values.

Now if you're referring to UTF-8 characters, there might be an issue in some cases where FlashFXP does not detect the SFTP server as one that supports UTF-8 passwords, in these situations FlashFXP will send the password using the system locale, and on failure it will try again, this time sending the password UTF-8 encoded.

ThorstenW · 02-05-2016, 08:27 AM

Thanks for your fast answer.

Yes, I also use symbols like ">".

I manually retyped the correct password, so it can't be an issue with import/export. Also I tried to force using UTF-8 in site manager -> options -> character set.

It will also not connect after the first fail. It just do not work.

If you want, I can setup a test account for you. Please let me know.

Thank you.

ThorstenW · 02-05-2016, 02:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigstar

...in these situations FlashFXP will send the password using the system locale, and on failure it will try again, this time sending the password UTF-8 encoded.

It's me again... I just found out that this mechanism do not work with SFTP. FlashFXP will not try a second (or more) login attemp. This happens only with normal FTP. Perhaps this is the problem?!?!

dWMcHARrWqmhHGH41H1C · 02-07-2016, 06:37 PM

I, too, have been having problems if my password has high ANSI characters such as these:

ü££éó·ÿÐ¨´úØßÀäÙ£ºÐïóãÎÿÛ ÜÇÌÚ¨ÀÓÁö¡¦ãþçÿ£¦¬ç«ü§¾ÒÁ

ThorstenW · 02-21-2016, 06:36 AM

Any update on this? I wrote two other answers, but no release by now?! The fallback to UTF-8 is definitly not working. There is no second try with SFTP. Also I'm not allowed to write a bug report. Very frustrating...

bigstar · 02-25-2016, 06:58 PM

Sorry I missed your replies.

Yes if you can setup a test account for me that would make things much easier to diagnose, please send me the information via a private message.

ThorstenW · 02-26-2016, 02:19 AM

Hello bigstar,

thanks for your reply !!!!

I just set up an account for you and recognized that a login with FileZilla was either not possible?!? (with my other accounts FileZilla worked, but FlashFXP not). So I did some tests and finally found out what the problem was.

In the past I wrote a script for new users, so that all folders and permissions are set up automatically. It seems that this script was not encoded in UTF-8.

After I changed (via ssh console) with passwd the password direct in console all characters works now in FileZilla and also in FlashFXP !!!!! :-)

Thank you very much!!

Best regards,

Thorsten

bigstar · 02-29-2016, 09:02 AM

Thank you for the update and the explanation of what lead to the problem; I wish more people would do that. It makes my life just a little bit easier

I am so glad that you were able to find the root cause of this issue and correct it.

I was worried that if the problem was in FlashFXP that I would not have enough time to get a fix in place for the next release.