You are the second person with this opinion! Will someone please tell me
how well IP works if someone else is answering ARP requests for your IP
address? Sure, the user's machine will boot. They'll get no message. But
nothing will work reliably - it all works "some of the time". The fact
is that this DOS attack already exists: it is an inherent weakness in
the ARP protocol (and there are other inherent weaknesses just like this
scattered throughout the TCP protocols). The DOS attack actually doesn't
bother me much, it's the man-in-the-middle possibilities that boggle the
mind with ARP ... after all, if I'm willing to pretend I'm you, maybe I
just want to record packets intended for you before fixing them up and
sending them to you ... with my special data embedded, of course. How
hard it would be to patch ftp packets containing kernel tarballs :-(
Are you saying that flaky behaviour is preferable to having a boot-time
message that indicates that some other site is using your IP and you
should fix it? Or am I missing something and the interface will work in
spite of the other person who is using your IP?
alex
P.S. Of course, since we all routinely enjoy uptimes measured in days
(not weeks or months - those uptimes are for users, not kernel hackers)
checking in ifconfig is enough for us ... but maybe the networking layer
should check periodically for those who run with uptimes of hundreds of
days.
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