From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 02:14:38 +0800
To: "Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com>
Subject: Re: PING packets illegal?
Message-ID: <199602181745.JAA08949@ix5.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 03:20 PM 2/14/96 -0500, markm@gak [cute machine name :-] wrote:
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Concerning the ITAR ...... what would happen if some Evil Hacker Dude in,
>> say, England, decided to ICMP-ping a host in America? Nothing wrong with
>> that ...... but if those ping packets contained little pieces of something
>> like PGP ...... would the host being pinged be breaking the law? Would
>> all the hosts in the route between that host and the host in England that
>> was doing the ping also be breaking the law?
>
>Exporting encryption to the U.S. from another country is not illegal, only
>exporting from the U.S. is.  The method of transmissioni is irrelevant.  It
>does not matter if TCP packets or ICMP-ping packets are used to transmit the
>data. 

You missed the fun part of his post - it's that ping packets return the
data they were pinged with, so the US-end host is re-exporting components of
PGP.
>From a legal perspective, it's tough to assert that the US user had scienter,
given that it pings scarcely reach the machine's consciousness, much less
the human users', since they're handled by ICMP rather than by a user-space
TCP or UDP
socket.  (Obviously, if there's a sniffer around this is slightly different.)

Is it possible to send out forged ping packets, pinging machine B with a From
address of C (fake) instead of A (real), so that Alice can talk to China via
Bob?
If so, it might be an interesting method for traversing some firewalls,
and also (if you write a ping-collector program) for back-channel
communications.

If you want to really abuse the protocols, 53 bytes probably fits into the
64 you can send in a ping, so you could implement ATM-over-ICMP :-)

#--
#				Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com / billstewart@attmail.com +1-415-442-2215
# http://www.idiom.com/~wcs     Pager +1-408-787-1281

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