Trivial File Transfer Protocol - Overview

Overview

Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) is a simple protocol to transfer files. It has been implemented on top of the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) using port number 69. TFTP is designed to be small and easy to implement, and therefore it lacks most of the features of a regular FTP. TFTP only reads and writes files (or mail) from/to a remote server. It cannot list directories, and currently has no provisions for user authentication.

In TFTP, any transfer begins with a request to read or write a file, which also serves to request a connection. If the server grants the request, the connection is opened and the file is sent in fixed length blocks of 512 bytes. Each data packet contains one block of data, and must be acknowledged by an acknowledgment packet before the next packet can be sent. A data packet of less than 512 bytes signals termination of a transfer. If a packet gets lost in the network, the intended recipient will timeout and may retransmit his last packet (which may be data or an acknowledgment), thus causing the sender of the lost packet to retransmit that lost packet. The sender has to keep just one packet on hand for retransmission, since the lock step acknowledgment guarantees that all older packets have been received. Notice that both machines involved in a transfer are considered senders and receivers. One sends data and receives acknowledgments, the other sends acknowledgments and receives data.

TFTP typically uses UDP as its transport protocol, but it is not a requirement. Data transfer is initiated on port 69, but the data transfer ports are chosen independently by the sender and receiver during initialization of the connection. The ports are chosen at random according to the parameters of the networking stack, typically from the range of Ephemeral ports.

TFTP defines three modes of transfer: netascii, octet, and mail. Netascii is a modified form of ASCII, defined in RFC 764. It consists of an 8-bit extension of the 7-bit ASCII character space from 0x20 to 0x7F (the printable characters and the space) and eight of the control characters. The allowed control characters include the null (0x00), the line feed (LF, 0x0A), and the carriage return (CR, 0x0D). Netascii also requires that the end of line marker on a host be translated to the character pair CR LF for transmission, and that any CR must be followed by either a LF or the null.

Octet allows for the transfer of arbitrary 8-bit bytes, with the received file identical to the sent file. More correctly, if a host receives an octet file and then returns it, the returned file must be identical to the original. The Mail transfer mode uses Netascii transfer, but the file is sent to an email recipient by specifying that recipient's email address as the file name. RFC 1350 declared this mode of transfer obsolete.

No security or authentication is provided by the protocol specification. Unix implementations often restrict file transfers to a single configured directory, and only to read from files with world readability, and only write to already existing files that have world writeability.