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re: what are realistic threats?

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   Date: Tue, 27 Sep 94 13:44:42 EDT
   From: dmk@allegra.att.com (Dave Kristol)
   ...
   Okay, let me ask a very specific question, one that my original posting
   asked in an obscure and elliptical way.  The question is, How realistic
   a threat are active attacks?  I'm talking about the kind of attack
   where you interpose your machine on a wire and can intercept, replace,
   or change messages.  (Passively listening and then replaying messages
   or pretending to be someone else are also active attacks, I guess, but
   I'm primarily concerned with those that require physical access to the
   network.)

   By "realistic", I mean both feasible and likely, by skilled
   non-governmental people or groups (i.e., hackers or organized crime).
   (Of course in the organized crime case, it's probably cheaper and
   easier to subvert people than technology.)

How realistic an active attack is depends on what you call an active
attack. I have seen programs that permit me to have a TCP connection to
you and yet provide an arbitrary IP source address. I may not be able
to see your responses, but I can feed you a lot of data that you will
believe originated from the claimed IP address.

Now consider that all it takes is one bad guy to write the attacking
program, and any idiot can then make use of it. Also keep in mind that
regional network providers have been successfully broken into (one as
recently as last week) which is to say bad guys have obtained control
over assets that route and direct traffic Internet traffic.

Don't worry about active attackers, plan on them!

                        -Jeff

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