Telnet (short for "telecommunications network")^[1] is a client/server application protocol that provides access to virtual terminals of remote systems on local area networks or the Internet.^[2] It is a protocol for bidirectional 8-bit communications. Its main goal was to connect terminal devices and terminal-oriented processes.^[3]

Telnet consists of two components: (1) the protocol itself which specifies how two parties are to communicate and (2) the software application that provides the service. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet control information in an 8-bit byte oriented data connection over the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Telnet was developed as secret technology in 1969 beginning with RFC 15, extended in RFC 855, and standardized as Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Internet Standard STD 8, one of the first Internet standards.^[4][5] Telnet transmits all information including usernames and passwords in plaintext so it is not recommended for security-sensitive applications such as remote management of routers.^[2][6] Telnet's use for this purpose has waned significantly in favor of SSH.^[7] Some extensions to Telnet which would provide encryption have been proposed.^[8]

Telnet consists of two components: (1) the protocol itself and (2) the service component. The telnet protocol is a client-server protocol, based on a reliable connection-oriented transport.^[2] This protocol is used to establish a connection to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) port number 23 or 2323, where a Telnet server application is listening.^[3][9][10] The Telnet protocol abstracts any terminal as a Network Virtual Terminal (NVT). The client must simulate a NVT using the NVT codes when messaging the server.

Telnet predated UDP/IP and originally ran over Network Control Protocol (NCP).^[11] The telnet service is best understood in the context of a user with a simple terminal using the local Telnet program (known as the client program) to run a logon session on a remote computer where the user's communications needs are handled by a Telnet server program.

Even though Telnet was an ad hoc protocol with no official definition until March 5, 1973,^[12] the name actually referred to Teletype Over Network Protocol as the RFC 206 (NIC 7176) on Telnet makes the connection clear:^[13]

The TELNET protocol is based upon the notion of a virtual teletype, employing a 7-bit ASCII character set. The primary function of a User TELNET, then, is to provide the means by which its users can 'hit' all the keys on that virtual teletype.^[14]

Essentially, it used an 8-bit channel to exchange 7-bit ASCII data. Any byte with the high bit set was a special Telnet character. On March 5, 1973, a Telnet protocol standard was defined at UCLA^[15] with the publication of two NIC documents: Telnet Protocol Specification, NIC 15372, and Telnet Option Specifications, NIC 15373.

Many extensions were made for Telnet because of its negotiable options protocol architecture. Some of these extensions have been adopted as Internet standards, IETF documents STD 27 through STD 32. Some extensions have been widely implemented and others are proposed standards on the IETF standards track (see below).

The Telnet service is the application providing services over the Telnet protocol. Most operating systems provide a service that can be installed or enabled to provide Telnet services to clients.^[16]

Telnet is vulnerable to network-based cyberattacks, such as packet sniffing sensitive information including passwords and fingerprinting.^[6][17] Telnet services can also be exploited to leak information about the server (such as hostnames, IP addresses and brand) by packet sniffing the banner. This information can then be searched to determine if a Telnet service accepts a connection without authentication. Telnet is also frequently exploited by malware due to being improperly configured.^[10] In fact, Telnet is targeted by attackers more frequently than other common protocols, especially when compared to UPnP, CoAP, MQTT, AMQP and XMPP ^{[citation needed]}. Common devices targeted are Internet of things devices, routers and modems.

The SANS Institute recommends that the use of Telnet for remote logins should be discontinued under normal circumstances for the following reasons:^[18]

• Telnet, by default, does not encrypt any data sent over the connection (including passwords), and so it is often feasible to eavesdrop on the communications and use the password later for malicious purposes; anybody who has access to a router, switch, hub or gateway located on the network between the two hosts where Telnet is being used can intercept the packets passing by and obtain login, password and whatever else is typed with a packet analyzer.^[17]
• Most Telnet implementations lack authentication. An estimated 22,887 Telnet-enabled devices found by security researchers not only lacked authentication but also provided unrestricted access to the system.^[10]
• Most Telnet authentication mechanisms are vulnerable to being intercepted by Man-in-the-middle attacks.^[17]

Extensions to Telnet provide Transport Layer Security (TLS) security and Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) authentication that address the above concerns.^[8] However, most Telnet implementations do not support these extensions; and they do not address other vulnerabilities such as parsing the banner information.^[17]

IBM 5250 or 3270 workstation emulation is supported via custom telnet clients, TN5250/TN3270, and IBM i systems. Clients and servers designed to pass IBM 5250 data streams over Telnet generally do support SSL encryption, as SSH does not include 5250 emulation. Under IBM i (also known as OS/400), port 992 is the default port for secured telnet.^[19]

Historically, Telnet provided access to a command-line interface on a remote host. However, because of serious security concerns when using Telnet over an open network such as the Internet, its use for this purpose has waned significantly in favor of SSH.^[20] The usage of Telnet for remote management has declined rapidly, especially on the public Internet, in favor of the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol.^[2][21] 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.

The Telnet client may be used in debugging network services such as SMTP, IRC, HTTP, FTP or POP3, to issue commands to a server and examine the responses.^[16] For example, Telnet client applications can establish an interactive TCP session to a port other than the Telnet server port. However, communication with such ports does not involve the Telnet protocol, because these services merely use a transparent 8-bit TCP connection, because most elements of the telnet protocol were designed around the idea of accessing a command line interface and none of these options or mechanisms is employed in most other internet service connections.

For example, a command line telnet client could make an HTTP request to a web server on TCP port 80 as follows:^[22]

$ telnet www.example.com 80
GET /path/to/file.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
Connection: close

The older protocol is used these days only in rare cases to access decades-old legacy equipment that does not support more modern protocols.^[23] For example, a large number of industrial and scientific devices only have 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 (or is replaced with one supporting SSH).

Telnet is commonly used by amateur radio operators for providing public information.^[24]

Despite recommendation against it, security researchers estimated that 7,096,465 exposed systems on the Internet continue to use Telnet as of 2021. However, estimates of this number have varied significantly, depending on the number of ports scanned beyond the default TCP port 23.^[10]

The technical details of Telnet are defined by a variety of specifications including RFC 854.^[3]

Telnet commands consist of at least two bytes.^[3] The first byte is the IAC escape character (typically byte 255) followed by the byte code for a given command:

All data octets except 0xff are transmitted over Telnet as is. (0xff, or 255 in decimal, is the IAC byte (Interpret As Command) which signals that the next byte is a telnet command. The command to insert 0xff into the stream is 0xff, so 0xff must be escaped by doubling it when sending data over the telnet protocol.)^[3]

Telnet also has a variety of options that terminals implementing Telnet should support.

• AbsoluteTelnet is a telnet client for Windows. It also supports SSH and SFTP.
• Inetutils includes a telnet client and server and is installed by default on many Linux distributions.
• Line Mode Browser, a command line web browser
• NCSA Telnet
• PuTTY and plink command line are a free, open-source SSH, Telnet, rlogin, and raw TCP client for Windows, Linux, and Unix.
• Rtelnet is a SOCKS client version of Telnet, providing similar functionality of telnet to those hosts which are behind firewall and NAT.
• RUMBA (Terminal Emulator)
• SecureCRT from Van Dyke Software
• SyncTERM is a BBS terminal program supporting Telnet, SSHv2, RLogin, Serial, Windows, *nix, and Mac OS X platforms, X/Y/ZMODEM and various BBS terminal emulations
• telnet.exe command line utility included in default installation of many versions of Microsoft Windows.
• TeraTerm
• ZOC Terminal

Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope from 1977 has been recreated as a text art movie served through Telnet.^[27]

• Banner grabbing
• HyTelnet
• Kermit
• List of terminal emulators
• Reverse telnet
• SSH
• Virtual terminal

• RFC 854, Telnet Protocol Specification
• RFC 855, Telnet Option Specifications
• RFC 856, Telnet Binary Transmission
• RFC 857, Telnet Echo Option
• RFC 858, Telnet Suppress Go Ahead Option
• RFC 859, Telnet Status Option
• RFC 860, Telnet Timing Mark Option
• RFC 861, Telnet Extended Options: List Option

• RFC 885, Telnet End of Record Option
• RFC 1073, Telnet Window Size Option
• RFC 1079, Telnet Terminal Speed Option
• RFC 1091, Telnet Terminal-Type Option
• RFC 1096, Telnet X Display Location Option
• RFC 1123, Requirements for Internet Hosts - Application and Support
• RFC 1184, Telnet Linemode Option
• RFC 1372, Telnet Remote Flow Control Option
• RFC 1572, Telnet Environment Option
• RFC 2941, Telnet Authentication Option
• RFC 2942, Telnet Authentication: Kerberos Version 5
• RFC 2943, TELNET Authentication Using DSA
• RFC 2944, Telnet Authentication: SRP
• RFC 2946, Telnet Data Encryption Option
• RFC 4248, The telnet URI Scheme

• RFC 1143, The Q Method of Implementing TELNET Option Negotiation
• RFC 1571, Telnet Environment Option Interoperability Issues
• RFC 2066, TELNET CHARSET Option

• RFC 748, TELNET RANDOMLY-LOSE Option (April Fool's Day RFC joke)
• RFC 1041, Telnet 3270 Regime Option
• RFC 1097, TELNET SUBLIMINAL-MESSAGE Option (April Fool's Day RFC joke)
• RFC 1205, 5250 Telnet Interface
• RFC 2355, TN3270 Enhancements
• RFC 2217, Telnet Com Port Control Option
• RFC 4777, IBM's iSeries Telnet Enhancements

• Telnet Options—The official list of assigned option numbers at iana.org
• Telnet Interactions Described as a Sequence Diagram
• Telnet protocol description, with NVT reference
• Microsoft TechNet:Telnet commands
• TELNET: The Mother of All (Application) Protocols
• "telnet.org—information about telnet". telnet.org. Retrieved 2020-01-07. Contains a list of telnet addresses and list of telnet clients