Bugtraq mailing list archives

Re: udp packet storms


From: perry () imsi com (Perry E. Metzger)
Date: Tue, 01 Nov 1994 01:02:20 -0500


You miss the point. It is unrelated to responding to broadcast pings
-- thats perfectly fine behavior. The problem is one of sending to the
broadcast address by accident, because that allows you to reply to a
packet who's source address is the broadcast address without realizing
that you might do so.

.pm

Mike Raffety says:
At my REQUEST, Wellfleet changed the behavior of their router software
so that it WOULD respond to broadcast pings (ones aimed at networks
on which the router has an interface directly attached, that is).  In
general, routers do NOT know that a particular packet is directed to a
broadcast address; that's up to the end router to deal with, setting
a broadcast MAC address in the final hop.

I frequently use "broadcast pings" to see what's on a network.



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