Food for Thought
It is easy to lay blame for this on the developers. Although the developers are naturally at fault for not initializing memory properly, the entire notion of having a separate “enabler” for a field in the header is perhaps a design flaw in TCP itself and might contribute to this kind of problem. Similar subtleties plague protocol specifications, as demonstrated in Chapter 7, in which a similar type of a vulnerability was caused by following a specification too closely, without giving much thought to its potential side effects.
Get Silence on the Wire now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
