smb@research.att.com says:

Agreed -- sadly its arriving VERY slowly. 4.4BSD Lite comes with a standards-compliant encrypted telnet implementation, however.

What standards? There are no RFCs, nor any current drafts, that define a telnet encryption option. The last draft I saw was from 1991, and Internet drafts expire after 6 months. As I recall, the idea that was being pushed then was to integrate encryption more closely with authentication.

There are much more recent drafts, Steve -- the telnet authentication option is now RFC1409, as of early last year, and the encryption draft is dated April 1993 -- see the nearest internet drafts mirror for a copy. Your recollection of the desire to merge authentication and encryption is correct -- to my knowledge, the new Cray telnet is an implementation of the currently circulated draft (which was also written at Cray). Perry