polimd/Computer Security/lesson_14.md

Computer Security - lesson 14

Stefano Zanero

20 May 2016

Network protocol attacks

The three common types of attacks are:

• Denial of Service: service unable to serve users
• Sniffing
• Spoofing

Denial of Service

A Killer packet is capable of bringing down the machine which is sent to. Ping-o-death(ICMP) and Teardrop(TCP) Were two vulnerabilities with the same principle of just handling cases provided by the standard, and not handling abnormal or erroneous packets.

Attacks like smurf are hardly fixed because the ones that have interest of fixing the vulnerability are not the same ones that need to spend the money in order to fix it.

Sniffing

Switched networks as opposed to hub-based networks send to every host only the packets that are destined to it, and also are faster.