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Date:      Wed, 11 Dec 1996 23:24:35 -0800 (PST)
From:      batie@agora.rdrop.com (Alan Batie)
To:        imp@village.org (Warner Losh)
Cc:        pete@sms.fi, taob@io.org, freebsd-security@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Risk of having bpf0? (was URGENT: Packet sniffer found on my system)
Message-ID:  <m0vY5VU-0008uqC@agora.rdrop.com>
In-Reply-To: <E0vY4ht-0005F8-00@rover.village.org> from "Warner Losh" at Dec 11, 96 11:33:21 pm

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If I read your response correctly, you're saying that some services you
use require bpf, and because of that, are a weak spot in your security
that you don't think should be necessary?  I can understand that point,
although I think that one always has administrative systems that are
going to be sweet targets because of what they gain when compromised (e.g.
accounting servers) and which need to be robustly secured.

Perhaps there's a better way to implement rarpd and dhcpd than bpf, but
I suspect (I'm no network programming expert) it would mean a new system
interface specifically to receive broadcast packets.  That's pretty ugly...

IPv6 eliminates broadcasts entirely, replacing them with multicasts, which
have a much safer mechanism for reception.  That's not an immediately
available option though :-)

-- 
Alan Batie                   ______      
batie@agora.rdrop.com        \    /      Assimilate this!
+1 503 452-0960               \  /       --Worf, First Contact
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