(Apologies for resurrecting the old ICMP TRACEROUTE thread.) In message <199609272118.OAA01404@quest.quake.net> Vadim wrote:
Alexis Rosen <alexis@panix.com> wrote:
I'm very surprised that noone has mentioned what seems to me to be the *really* serious drawback to this scheme.
Yes, indeed a single traceroute packet with forged address can generate many responses.
Unless you use a scheme similar to multicast traceroute, which uses a single packet which travels hop-by-hop and gets more information appended to the packet at each hop. There is a hop limit in the packet to be able to do "expanding-length" searches like traceroute does now, or if you set the hop limit to 255 the full path will be traced if every hop supports traceroute and you will get one big answer packet back. Bill