Concluding Thoughts
This chapter and Chapter 12 have illustrated powerful techniques in computer security, showing how a server can be protected by a default-drop packet filter, through which access is granted only to clients able to prove their identities to a passively monitoring device. Port knocking was the first technology to implement this idea, but due to some serious limitations in the port-knocking architecture (including the difficulty of adequately addressing the replay problem and the inability to transmit more than a few tens of bytes), SPA has proved itself a more robust technology. The notion of an authorizing Ethernet sniffer combined with a default-drop packet filter is a relatively new one in the computer security field, but ...
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