Is all traffic within a network send to all hosts? - networking

I am studying routing tables. Say you have the following line in a routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask
192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0
This would mean that there is no gateway for local traffic on the network and some resoures write that all the traffic on a local network is send to all hosts on the network. This raises two question:
Isn't it a security risk that every host receives all traffic, even though it is not intended for that host.
Does it slow the network when every packet is send to all hosts over either cables or wifi even though it is intended for only 1 host?

Is all traffic within a network send to all hosts?
No. Traffic sent from a host to another host in the same network is sent via layer-2, not layer-3. That means that traffic from hosts in an IP network are sent to other hosts in the same network via the layer-2, e.g. ethernet, network.
There is a protocol called ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) that is used to resolve layer-3 (IP) to layer-2 (MAC) addresses.
A host sending something to another host will mask both the source and destination layer-3 addresses with the configured host network mask. If the results are the same, it will use ARP to address the layer-2 frame with the destination host MAC address, otherwise it will use ARP to address the frame with the layer-2 address of its configured gateway.
If there is no configured gateway, the host should drop the traffic between layer-3 and layer-2.
A host will drop any traffic not sent its MAC addresses, the broadcast address, or any multicast address for which it is not subscribed.

Related

Difference between Default gateway and a Router

Actually i have three Questions in this regard
IP ADDRESS:- Does router and default gateway same? if same , then why router (internet IP) address is public and Gateway IP address is local (i mean why both are different)
MAC ADDRESS:- what is the difference between WAN MAC address and ROUTER MAC address and Default Gateway MAC address , why are they different?
Difference between Data packets and IP packets? are data packets travel from a host to a remote server present in some other country through submarine cables or through router to router by hop-by-hop transport?
I am a new learner , please don't get angry if i asked something silly
Router and gateway are essentially the same - a gateway provides access to remote subnets. The hardware for that is called router. Routers route between networks.
A default gateway is a gateway to provide access to all subnets that are not specifically configured. At a minimum, a host requires a default gateway to connect to the Internet.
IP addresses are configured on (logical) interfaces. A router usually requires at least two interfaces, each configured with an IP address from the connected subnet.
Likewise, a MAC address is required for a physical interface - specifically for the data link layer to work (OSI layer 2). It uniquely identifies interfaces within a network segment and is used by network switches for forwarding.
A data packet can be many things. An IP packet is a packet (also protocol data unit PDU) on the network layer (OSI layer 3). IP packets travel between hosts around the globe and transport user data (payload) between them.
User data is actually transported by an application-layer protocol (e.g. HTTP) that in turn uses a transport-layer protocol (e.g. TCP) between processes/applications. The transport layer uses the network layer (IPv4 or IPv6) which in turn uses the data link layer (e.g. Ethernet) which in turn uses the physical layer (physical interfaces and cables).

Computer Networks: how do packets find a computer in a network?

Suppose I have a computer network, and all computers in this network have the same external IP. The network uses a NAT service to direct packets to specific computers in the network.
Let's say that one computer in the network sends a packet to a famous website. The packet includes the source IP, which is probably the external IP address and the destination IP (the IP of the website).
Now, the website returns a response to the external IP address of the network. My question is - once the response has reached the router of the network, how does it know to which computer in the network to send the response? All computers in the network have the same external IP.
the router do this with NAT Table.

Tcp spoofing with a trusted ip

I am facing a very strange problem. I have a task to establish a TCP connection to a server who has a trusted IP. And I have to run the code in a host with private IP address. The trusted IP is 10.10.10.15, which is also a private IP. And the question arises that the IP address of my host and the trusted IP is not on the same network. To be specific, my IP address is 10.0.35.1/24. Please let me know if there is any solution to this problem
Presumably these subnets, i.e. 10.10.10.0/24 (?) and 10.0.35.0/24, are part of your local network. You will need a Layer 3 device to perform inter-VLAN routing.
This will be a router with Layer 3 VLAN interfaces, in the Cisco world they would be SVIs, that would be acting as the default gateway of the subnets in your network. What happens is all traffic that needs to go between two hosts between different networks, has to go through their default gateway and it will be routed to the destination network/VLAN.
As long as the network devices between the two clients are able to route packets between these networks, the hosts will be able to reach each other. In your code, you simply need to specify that these packets need to go to the private IP address of the other host.

Is ARP applicable out of a subnet?

When a computer, with IP address IPs and default gateway IPg, is sending a datagram to destination with IP address IPd on a different subnet, it will perform:
a)- ARP(IPg)
b)- ARP( IPd)
c)- ARP(IPs)
d)- ARP(0)
Sending packet to another subnet actually means sending packet to gateway, since gateway is responsible for proper routing between subnets. Thus computer will perform discovery of gateway MAC address unless it's cached.

How do two computers connect to same external address through NAT?

If I have two internal computers connecting to the same external IP address through a NAT router, how is the router able to get the traffic to the correct internal computer? It is my understanding that NAT forwards incoming packets to the computer that recently sent outgoing packets to the [incoming packet's] sender's IP address. Since both computers are sending to the same address, does the router forward the packet to both? If that is the case, is it the responsibility of the client software to determine which packets are relevant?
Is it possible if both computers are attempting to connect to the same port?
When you open a socket, you need to address a port of the destination system and open a conjugate listening port on your own system to receive any response. You have to send the destination system your listening port.
Having more than one system using the same modem
When you start a web browser, and go to www.google.com:80, your browser obtains/searches for a free non-system conjugate port from the system for listening. Let us say, the conjugate port is 10000. The listener port is for receiving the http stream back from google.
Then your kid sitting next to you incidentally also browses www.google.com:80 and his/her google session of the play station or xbox-whatever also incidentally is assigned conjugate port 10000.
Both of you are sitting behind a cable modem, and behind the cable modem is your wireless router. And both of your systems are behind the wireless router - All sitting in that sequence, network topology-wise.
To prevent port address collision on the router/modem
Let us say that your cable company DHCP assigns your modem ip4 adress 72.72.72.72. But your wireless router DHCP assigns 192.168.0.10 to your system and to 192.168.0.11 to your kid's system.
When the frame carrying the information of your listener ports passes thro your NAT router, it would translate either one or both listening- ports. Let's say port 15000 for your page and port 16000 for your kid's page.
Your wireless router then sends your requests to google server as coming from 72.72.72.72:15000 and 72.72.72.72:16000.
The google server then responds individually to 72.72.72.72:15000 and 72.72.72.72:16000 and when you wireless router encounters the response, it reaches into the mapping that it has stored and translates 72.72.72.72:15000 to 192.168.0.10:10000 to reach your system but translates 72.72.72.72:16000 to 192.168.0.11:10000 to reach your kid's system.
Running web/game/ftp/etc servers
But what if you have a web server or an ftp server running on your system. What if you have two systems and both have a web server and both web servers are listening on port 80?
Let us say the local ip addresses registered/assigned with your wireless router of your first web server system is 192.168.0.30 and your second web server system is 192.168.0.40.
The wireless router would have a configuration web page usually by default 192.168.0.1:80, unless you changed it. There would be a tab to on the page where you could define/reserve application port mappings.
You could register with your wireless router to reserve the mapping
192.168.0.30:80 => outgoing port 8080
192.168.0.40:80 => outgoing port 8088
So that you have to phone your friends your web/game servers are addressable through
72.72.72.72:8080 and 72.72.72.72:8088 respectively,
where the wireless router would preclude its port 8080 and 8088 from its own dynamic NAT usage.
Of course, 72.72.72.72 is as good as only before your ISP DHCP decide to renew the ip4 address of your modem to say, 72.72.90.200. After which you would have to phone/email your friends and say
Hey, the servers' addresses have changed to 72.72.90.200:8080 and 72.72.90.200:8088 respectively. Or you could subscribe to dynamic dns (ddns) service to use a named domain where the ddns service will need you to install a simple heartbeat utility on your system to help them monitor the address variation. DDNS translation is a separate issue/strategy.
NAT modems
Newer ISP contracts supply you with a modem that has NAT. If so, you have to switch off either the one on your modem or the one on your wireless router. You should not use both - what's the point in translating twice because NAT is simply to prevent address collision. When you switch off NAT from your wireless router, it can operate as a hub switch and not a router anymore so that you could connect it to the modem using one of its LAN socket instead of thro its WAN socket.
The router manages "source" ports that are separate for each computer. While you may be connecting to port 80 on the "destination" the router may assign the source port to some high number port.
Wikipedia sums it up as
Network address translation involves
re-writing the source and/or
destination IP addresses and usually
also the TCP/UDP port numbers of IP
packets as they pass through the NAT.
Checksums (both IP and TCP/UDP) must
also be rewritten to take account of
the changes.
Already good answers are provided, but here is another example:
HOST A addr HOST B addr
10.1.0.2:4040 10.1.0.3:4040
-----------------------------------------
NAT 200.50.50.28:4040 200.50.50.28:4041 (what external host sees)
200.50.50.28 is router's global (internet) IP.
Every port number is unique in the NAT table. And of course the router does all the dirty job of modifying the source and destination addresses transparently.
It uses different ports for incoming external traffic, and the NAT then routes the packets on one port to one internal IP address, and the packets from the other port to the other internal IP address... The iniital request from each internal computer, when it goes through the NAT on the way out, establishes which port will be used for the incoming traffic from the external ip address, and it tells the external server what port to send it's traffic back on for that connection.
RFC3022 provides a lot of information on how this works
Since public facing or external IP Address that was given by Internet Service Provider (ISP) has been discussed, I would like to add on this.
You can ask your ISP to have your public IP Address not change. It will become static, so that you do not have to inform your friends to change the IP Address if they want to access your server inside your Network Address Translator (NAT).
As of this writing, static IP Address cost around 100 bucks. Most of the ISP they call it business account.
You can determine your public facing IP Address by googling "what is my ip address".

Resources