ucp: UDT copy (very remote file transfer)

This is basically a clone of SSH's scp command that uses the UDT (UDP Data Transport) over UDP instead of passing data through the TCP SSH connection. SSH (and TCP) is used for authentication and setup, just like mosh does; the server-side ucp process is not a daemon and is not running continuously.

The motivation for this tool is to get better bandwidth utilization over high-latency links with mild packet loss, while remaining well-behaved netizen.

Just like scp, this program is based on the old rcp "protocol" and is very simple. There is no session resumption, or extra checksums or integrity checks, support for file metadata beyond old-school UNIX permissions, or anything like that. There is a bunch of overhead sending small files, so if you have a lot of those and a high-latency link you should probably tar things up first. There also isn't any compression, so you might want to gzip that tarball.

Status

Circa June 2016, this is very much a work in progress; see TODO. Only getting/sending single files will ever work. IPv6 is not implemented.

Running with crypto enabled (the default) slows things to a drag. Without crypto, the tool is generally at least as fast as any other transfer tool (eg, faster than scp, bbcp, or UTP).

Dependencies

You need the Sodium (wrapper for NaCl) and UDT libraries and headers installed. On Linux, this is, eg, libsodium-dev and libudt-dev. Unfortunately, the version of libsodium from Debian Jessie won't work, you need the Stretch or newer version.

Uses sodiumoxide instead of rust-crypto because there aren't online docs for rust-crypto, and AFAIK Sodium and NaCl have been reviewed and rust-crypto has not.

Uses rustc-serialize instead of serde, because serde seems more complicated (both nightly/compiler API and a non-macro API?) and doesn't seem to support base64.

Usage

The command must be installed on both the local and remote machines.

To send a local file named insurance.aes256 to the home directory of robin on files.the-nsa.org:

ucp insurance.aes256 robin@files.the-nsa.org:

To copy a complete directory of files from the directory "~/everything/" on the remote server to a new folder /tmp/img/ locally:

ucp -r robin@files.the-nsa.org:everything /tmp

rcp Protocol

The rcp protocol is described in a Jul 09, 2007 blog post by janp, which is mirrored as text in the doc folder of this repo.