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Re: Can the SPF technique be used to stop IP address spoofing?

2004-11-23 12:23:05
On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 02:36, David Woodhouse wrote:
I've just had a great idea. IP spoofing can be a big problem -- it can
be used to poison DNS caches and hijack TCP sessions, and to cause a
denial of service attack.

We can use the same technique as SPF to address this forgery, though. I
can publish a record which says the MAC address of my Ethernet card or
the phone number I dial from (or whatever's appropriate to my
connection). 
Works for local networks, but once the routers get involved.... It's
even worse than a chain of ten forwarding mail servers, it varying
chains of on average eight to thirty-two hops of routers.
So I think you'd be hard pressed to bet IPsec with opportunistic keying,
then you simply sign the packets.

For the local network I always thought it would be neat to keep a list
of MACs that were authorized to be on a network, so that if someone
brought in a laptop I can listen to the arp/rarp/dhcp whatever traffic
and be notified about the intruder quick. I've been in places where we
had less than thirty machines on a segment that didn't get changed that
often -- so the false positives would be rare enough. Tie this stuff
into your firewall, and you can at least keep intruders from reaching
the outside world without your permission.

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