Fighting the worms of mass destruction (Economist) [LWN.net]

Fighting the worms of mass destruction (Economist)

Posted Dec 1, 2003 21:29 UTC (Mon) by proski (guest, #104)
In reply to: Fighting the worms of mass destruction (Economist) by ccchips
Parent article: Fighting the worms of mass destruction (Economist)

The problem is, if you want e.g. spammers to be traceable, then somebody (e.g. a guy offended by your comments on his website) can fake a spam purporting to be from your IP address and trace it to you.

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Fighting the worms of mass destruction (Economist)

Posted Dec 1, 2003 22:41 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

IP address spoofing could be largely eliminated, if every router on the net were configured to perform a simple sanity check: don't let packets pass that have an "impossible" source address from the perspective of that router.

That is, if an ISP has sold you a range of static IP addresses, its routers should drop any packets from you that claim a return address outside that range. If everyone did this, spoofing would be much more limited.