Request: player.ip

[cbk1994]

Originally Posted by middo

The biggest problem with having people's IPs, is that, if you're a malicious person, can check to see if there is a trojan on your computer, and then abuse it. It's not a matter of infecting you with a trojan, a lot of times people are infected, but either the (depending on the version) trojan can't broadcast itself, or simply is broken in some way. But if they know your IP, they can target you directly and try to access you through what may already be on your computer, get your passwords, etc.

It's a bad idea.

Ever heard of anti-virus programs?

If you're already infected with a trojan, they already know your IP!

[Chandler]

Originally Posted by cbkbud

Ever heard of anti-virus programs?

If you're already infected with a trojan, they already know your IP!

no...

[Twinny]

Trojans normally try and disable Anti virus/firewalls by killing the process and corrupting the files. And yes, they can advertise an ip address. The great thing about NAT boxes is that the outside world can only see your NAT boxes global (or sometimes even local within a global) address so they can't directly access hosts inside it without port forwarding set up.

[cbk1994]

Originally Posted by Twinny

Trojans normally try and disable Anti virus/firewalls by killing the process and corrupting the files. And yes, they can advertise an ip address. The great thing about NAT boxes is that the outside world can only see your NAT boxes global (or sometimes even local within a global) address so they can't directly access hosts inside it without port forwarding set up.

Out of curiosity ... what is a NAT box?

--

Skyld, you said this would be abused. Like I asked,
HOW CAN AN IP BE ABUSED?!

[Gambet]

Originally Posted by cbkbud

Out of curiosity ... what is a NAT box?

Network Address Translation box

NAT boxes could solve the pending address shortage in IP networks.

They act as a buffer between the global Internet and IP local networks (subnet). The local side addresses would have to be unique only at the subnet level. When a host on the subnet side of a NAT box sends traffic over the Internet, the NAT box strips out the local address and replaces it with the globally unique address assigned to that subnet.

[Twinny]

In more basic terms, NAT takes a local address (10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x-172.31.x.x, 192.168.x.x) and turns it into an outside address (be it another local address or more commonly - a global internet address) and sends the data. The outside world can only see the router. The great thing is: unless a session is established or port forwarding is enabled: the outside world can't access anything past it.

NAT/PAT also uses unique identifers (or source ports for PAT) to identify what data gets sent where) so IP spoofing is impossible. The even greater thing is that you can overload an address: i.e. an entire 192.168.1.0 network could use 1 overloaded global address. If you have multiple global addresses in the pool, it will use the current address until no more source ports are available and move onto the next address.

If you have multiple computers using your broadband connection at the same time (either through a router/switch combo, a router to switch combo or if you're unlucky, a router to hub connection) then chances are that your router supports NAT. If not, programs like smoothwall (Linux glory and very powerful) or Microsoft ISA (A kick ass high-end firewall. Recommended if you know what you're doing) can also act as a NAT service.

Disadvantages: some services can be hampered by the presence of a NAT. E.g. FTP. FTP uses two concurrent connections (data and control port) to transmit data. NAT screws this up.