Vulnerability Development mailing list archives

Re: ethernet cards & promisc mode


From: lordvadr () POBOX COM (C.J. Oster)
Date: Thu, 4 May 2000 10:35:40 -0500


I'm fairly sure it's a driver issue, not the card allowing you to do so or
not.  You could always take the kernel module and turn off it's ability to
enter promisc mode.  You may have to hack the ethernet layer also.
Promisc mode just means the driver stops checking it's hardware address
against the destination address, so I belive that this is a driver issue.
You can only enter promisc mode as root anyway, so if an attacker got that
far, nothing prevents him from building a working driver and using that.
You could force the attacker to build an entire kernel and reboot the
machine by building the card driver into the kernel rather than a module,
but one can still work around that as well.

-CJO-

On Wed, 3 May 2000, Security Team wrote:

are there any ethernet cards on the market that work well with linux, that
dont allow you
to go into promisc mode?

kw



             C.J. Oster (Linux Guru/Surge Addict) cjo () pobox com
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          Network Security Manager      Unix System Administrator
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          security () bromleygroup com        Urbana-Champaign
          (217)355.1132                 (217)265.8427
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