Re: PING packets illegal?

[Adam Shostack <adam@lighthouse.homeport.org>]

Bill Stewart wrote:

| >From a legal perspective, it's tough to assert that the US user had scienter,
| given that it pings scarcely reach the machine's consciousness, much less
| the human users', since they're handled by ICMP rather than by a user-space
| TCP or UDP
| socket.  (Obviously, if there's a sniffer around this is slightly different.)
| 
| Is it possible to send out forged ping packets, pinging machine B with a From
| address of C (fake) instead of A (real), so that Alice can talk to China via
| Bob?
| If so, it might be an interesting method for traversing some firewalls,
| and also (if you write a ping-collector program) for back-channel
| communications.

It should be possible to fake a source address.

Also, if you want to traverse a firewall from the inside, its usually
pretty easy to do with mail, or over telnet.  Stego in ping would show
up in a firewalls logs more prominently than a lot of mail.

| If you want to really abuse the protocols, 53 bytes probably fits into the
| 64 you can send in a ping, so you could implement ATM-over-ICMP :-)

Err, you can put up to 1500 bytes into an ICMP echo request, if its
properly implemented.

Adam

-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume