On Mon, Jul 12, 1999 at 10:19:32PM -0400, Rabid Wombat wrote:
>
> This is b.s.
>
> You should say that there is nothing about cable modems that makes them
> any less secure than any other shared media solution, such as
> ethernet, which is totally non-secure.
>
> Ethernet NICs use the same MAC scheme you mentioned to drop all datagrams
> not destined to either the MAC address of the NIC or to the broadcast
> address. This is easily circumvented by installing a promiscuous mode
> driver, which will accept and pass up the stack all the datagrams it
> recieves.
>
> The only way around this is to apply switching, which puts only traffic
> destined for a specific address on a specific cable segment. This gets
> away from the "shared media" problem, but increases cost. Cable companies
> are not currently built on this model.
>
But this is not as simple as installing software on your machine
connected to the cable modem. You would have to install your
promiscuous driver on the cable modem, and in a properly configured
cable network, depending on the vendor, a cable modem won't boot
with a boot image not matching the checksum stored in the headend
provisioning system. So, while theoretically, technically possible,
in a propely configured cable network, it can't happen. Go ahead
and try, i'd be interested to hear anyone with success stories.
-
[To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
"unsubscribe firewalls" in the body of the message.]
