Book Image

Penetration Testing with the Bash shell

By : Keith Harald Esrick Makan
Book Image

Penetration Testing with the Bash shell

By: Keith Harald Esrick Makan

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (13 chapters)

MAC and ARP abuse


(MAC) Media Access Control addresses are the addresses given to devices on a local network. These addresses are used by layer 2 protocols to pinpoint physical devices such as routers, laptops, DNS servers, and other devices adjacent to each other on a logical network. Inherently, unless other controls are enforced, nothing prevents one device from forging the origin of its packets by using another device's MAC address. This is termed a MAC spoofing attack. Usually, you will want to forge or spoof your MAC if some resources on your target network are controlled by means of a MAC address, namely if the protection for a given resource uses a MAC address as an authentication credential or as identification material. This idea is inherently flawed, purely on the basis that if you're trying to protect something that's secret, you cannot do so without relying on something that's secret. This is a way of paraphrasing an age-old principle of cryptography and information theory...