question on raw sockets and source IP address validation

Hi all,

Normally when sending a packet on a SOCK_RAW socket the source IP address is validated against the addresses configured on the host. If the address isn't configured, the packet isn't sent.

This can be avoided by setting IP_HDRINCL, but then the app needs to handle all the fragmentation itself.

Is there any way to bypass the source address validation without IP_HDRINCL?

Thanks,

Chris

Nope, not with socket(AF_INET, SOCK_RAW, ...). its an IPv4 socket, so you get ipv4 routing. If you don't want the ipv4 behavior, you can always use AF_PACKET, to send raw frames direct to network interfaces. Of course, thats going to imply that you do all your ip level fragmentation yourself as well.

That said, its not doing source validation, your socket is actually doing a route lookup on the flow from your specified source address to your destination address. So you should be able to fool the socket into doing the lookup by adding a route to your routing table from your source address to your destination address via the interface that you want to send the frames out of.

Regards
Neil

Hmm...that's an interesting point. Worth investigating for sure.

Thanks,

Chris