Tftp (Trivial File Transfer Protocol) is a very simple client server protocol used to transfer data and files over network. Ftp is very popular protocol but it have a lot features which may not be needed always. Tftp is lightweight alternative to Ftp protocol. We can say that Tftp is featureless protocol because it only download and upload files.

• Tftp has no authentication or authorization mechanism.
• Tftp protocol do not have file listing feature.
• Tftp is clear text or not encrypted protocol
• Tftp is fast and simple to implement
• Tftp uses generally UDP

Install

Installation of Tftp tools is simple as the protocol. As Tftp lightweight there is no dependency for other libraries.

Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Kali:

We will install tftp for Debian, Mint, Ubuntu and Kali like below.

$ apt install tftp

Fedora, CentOS, RedHat:

We can install tftp with the following command on Fedora, CentOS, RedHat.

$ yum install tftp

Syntax

We will use following syntax for tftp command in normal commandline usage.

tftp [host]

Help

$ info tftp

Connect

Connecting a to the Tftp server is very easy. As stated in the beginning of the post Tftp do not have any authentication and authorization mechanisms. so Just providing the servers host name of IP address is enough to connect Tftp server. In this example we will connect 192.168.122.239 IP address.

$ tftp 192.168.122.239

Interactive Shell

After connection to the Tftp server we will get an interactive shell. In this shell we will issue commands to get information about status of the connection, download or get files, upload or put files to the server. We can list available commands provided by Tftp shell with ? .

?

Upload or Put File

We can upload or put files to the Tftp server with put command. In the example we upload file named body.txt

put body.txt

Download or Get File

We can also download or get files from Tftp server with get command. In the example we get file named body.txt from Tftp server.

get body.txt

Show Status

As Tftp works generally on the UDP protocol there is no session like TCP. But we can query current connection status with status command. This status command will provide us information about the connected server IP address, current working mode, Rexmt-interval, Max-timeout etc.

status

Quit From Shell

In order to quit from the Tftp shell we need to issue the q command.

Verbose Mode

While making transfer we may need more information about the transmission. We can get more information about the transfer with the verbose mode.

verbose