The Network Security. Org

Why spoofing is the number one security problem on the Internet, and how we should fight it

This article explains the widely underestimated security impact of the current lack of anti-spoofing measures on the Internet.

The Internet Protocol (IP) basically works with small portions of data called datagrams that contain a small header that is used for address information. This header contains two addresses:

* The destination address.
* The source address.

The first address determines where the datagram should go. The second address tells the destination where the datagram originated. In the handling of this second address there lies a problem.

Part of the merits of the IP protocol come from the fact that it is connection less, and that routers make routing actions based on destination address without any influence by the source address. This works fine on the parts of the Internet that are designed for redundancy, where filtering would in many cases be impossible, but unfortunately this way of working is deadly when used outside of the major backbone networks.
Network administrators have the choice to do source based IP filtering on their routers with so called anti-spoofing filters. Unfortunately much of the network administrators do not. Further, network hardware and OS manufacturers have the choice to make 'anti-spoofing' the default operation for their products, unfortunately non of them seem to take their responsibility on that either. It is this combination of reluctance and ignorance that is the indirect course of the fast majority of security problems on the Internet.
This article I tries to explain the full extend of the spoofing problems on Internet security, and the methods that should be taken by responsible administrators and manufacturers. Why spoofing is the number one security problem on the Internet, and how we should fight it

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