Re: Security Issues with Wake on Lan (WOL)

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Mon, 01 Nov 2004 13:26:08 PST, Paul Beckman said:

> for many disparate customers.  One component has
> recently asked for us to enable ip broadcasts
> (something we kept disabled on our routers for
> security) so as to use the functionality of Wake on
> Lan (WOL)

Unintended consequences - if you have enough machines that go to sleep
with WOL enabled to make supporting it worth doing, does your power
infrastructure have the ability to power up that many systems at the
same time (note that for the purposes of power-up drain, even a flood
of several thousand ping packets to sequential addresses is "the same
time").  Power-up drain (notably spinning up disks) is *much* higher
than the steady-state drain.

Another issue - if an attacker can power up an unpatched or misconfigured or
otherwise vulnerable machine, they can then do what they want to it all
night.....

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