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What Is Telnet?

Telnet is a protocol developed in 1969 that provides command line access to remote devices over a network. It transmits user input and output as plain text, making passwords and other data vulnerable. While telnet was important historically, its lack of encryption caused it to be replaced by more secure protocols like SSH. Telnet is still used to access some legacy systems that do not support modern encrypted protocols.

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803 views

What Is Telnet?

Telnet is a protocol developed in 1969 that provides command line access to remote devices over a network. It transmits user input and output as plain text, making passwords and other data vulnerable. While telnet was important historically, its lack of encryption caused it to be replaced by more secure protocols like SSH. Telnet is still used to access some legacy systems that do not support modern encrypted protocols.

Uploaded by

lalit Kumar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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What is Telnet?

Telnet, developed in 1969, is a protocol that provides a command line interface for communication
with a remote device or server, sometimes employed for remote management but also for initial
device setup like network hardware. Telnet stands for Teletype Network, but it can also be used as a
verb; 'to telnet' is to establish a connection using the Telnet protocol.

History of Telnet
Telnet was originally run over Network Control Program (NCP) protocols. It was later called Teletype
Over Network Protocol, or TONP. While it was used informally for some time, it was officially
established on March 5, 1973, in published papers.

In early forms, Telnet used American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) delivered
over an 8-bit channel to enable remote computers to communicate with basic text.

Over time, several Telnet extensions were created. Telnet has been around as a tool for
programmers for several decades. The first version of Telnet was created for the Advanced Research
Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the precursor to the modern internet, in the 1960s. It was one
of the first tools created to link computers remotely over large distances. A Telnet protocol was
developed by researchers and professionals in 1971 followed by the Telnet system in 1983.

How does Telnet work?


Telnet provides users with a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication system utilizing a
virtual terminal connection over 8 byte. User data is interspersed in-band with telnet control
information over the transmission control protocol (TCP). Often, Telnet was used on a terminal to
execute functions remotely.

The user connects to the server by using the Telnet protocol, which means entering Telnet into a
command prompt by following this syntax: telnet hostname port. The user then executes commands
on the server by using specific Telnet commands into the Telnet prompt. To end a session and log
off, the user ends a Telnet command with Telnet.

Uses
Telnet can be used to test or troubleshoot remote web or mail servers, as well as for remote access
to MUDs (multi-user dungeon games) and trusted internal networks.

Advantages
 Makes itself available for many different operating systems.
 It permits to test access the school network from a device to specific ports on an external
server.
 Configuration elements of networking hardware can be achieved using it.
 Accessing Remote Computers: the greatest advantages of this software is so as to its consent
to remote access to a different computer.
 It helps to save a large amount of time, connectivity establishment and task accomplishment
can be achieved on different computers very instantly.
 Router configuration: problem fixing is very much easy here since it uses plain text for
transfer, hence data transmission is accomplished with more access and less amount of
transfer.
 Universal: It can be flexibly deployed on any of the computers, even different OS can
connect each other irrespective of their version and time of release.
 It makes available users by an interactive and bidirectional test-oriented message system
exploit an effective terminal connection which is much more than 8 bytes. User data is
sprinkled in the band long with telnet control information above the TCP. It helps to achieve
some functions in a remote manner.

Disadvantages
 User ID and password are transmitted without any encryption. This leads to security risk in
Telnet protocol as eavesdropping and snooping are easier to implement by intruders or
hackers.
 It is not possible to run GUI based tools over Telnet connection as it is character based
communication tool. It is not possible to transmit cursor movements and other GUI
information.
 It is very inefficient protocol.
 Each key strokes require several context switches before it reaches the other end.
 It is expensive due to slow typing speeds.

Security
When Telnet was initially developed in 1969, most networked computers were in the computer
departments of academic institutions, or at large private and government research facilities. But in
this environment, security was not nearly as much as it became after the bandwidth explosion of the
1990s. The rise in the number of people with access to the internet, and by extension the number of
people attempting to hack other people’s servers, made encrypted alternatives (or you say security)
necessary.

Telnet is not a secure protocol and is unencrypted. By monitoring a user's connection, anyone can
access a person's username, password and other private information that is typed over the Telnet
session in plaintext. With this information, access can be gained to the user's device.

SSH and related protocols


Because of security-related shortcomings, the usage of the Telnet protocol drops rapidly, especially
on the public internet, in favor of the Secure Shell Protocol, first released in 1995. SSH has practically
replaced Telnet, and the older protocol is used these days only in rare cases to access decades old
legacy equipment that does not support more modern protocols. SSH provides much of the
functionality of telnet, with the addition of strong encryption to prevent sensitive data such as
passwords from being intercepted, and public key authentication, to ensure that the remote
computer is actually who it claims to be. As has happened with other early Internet protocols,
extensions to the Telnet protocol provide Transport Layer Security (TLS) security and Simple
Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) authentication that address the above concerns. However,
most Telnet implementations do not support these extensions; and there has been relatively little
interest in implementing these as SSH is adequate for most purposes.

It is of note that there are a large number of industrial and scientific devices which have only Telnet
available as a communication option. Some are built with only a standard RS-232 port and use a
serial server hardware appliance to provide the translation between the TCP/Telnet data and the RS-
232 serial data. In such cases, SSH is not an option unless the interface appliance can be configured
for SSH.

Telnet is still used by hobbyists, especially among Amateur radio operators. The Winlink protocol
supports packet radio via a Telnet connection.

More Resources
https://youtu.be/tZop-zjYkrU

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