• ARIN will officially retire its FTP service on March 31, 2025, following community feedback and the growing obsolescence of FTP due to security concerns and better alternatives like HTTPS.
  • Users are encouraged to transition to HTTPS for accessing ARIN’s data and reports currently available via FTP.

What happened: ARIN to retire FTP service and transition to HTTPS in 2025

In September 2024, ARIN held a consultation to gather community feedback on the retirement of its File Transfer Protocol (FTP) support. Based on the results, ARIN has decided to terminate FTP services by March 31, 2025.

FTP, one of the earliest applications developed for ARPANET, is nearly 50 years old and has been phased out by many systems, including major Linux distributions and browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, which stopped supporting FTP file downloads in 2021. Given FTP’s security vulnerabilities, the adoption of more secure protocols like HTTPS, and the shift in community needs, ARIN is transitioning away from FTP.

Since ARIN’s inception, FTP has been used to distribute reports and templates, and while it will no longer be supported, ARIN is ensuring that all data previously available via FTP will also be accessible via HTTPS. The transition is simple: users just need to replace the “ftp://” protocol with “https://” in their access paths, which will continue to provide the same data.

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Why it’s important

The retirement of FTP marks a step toward modernizing ARIN’s services, focusing on security and compatibility with current standards. While FTP has been a reliable tool for many years, the adoption of HTTPS aligns with global best practices for data security and ensures a smoother experience for users.

With this change, ARIN is also collaborating with other Regional Internet Registries to ensure data synchronization and mirroring methods that support the continued operation of critical services. This shift is crucial for ensuring that users remain able to access ARIN’s freely available information securely and efficiently.