Chapter 3. Attacking the Spanning Tree Protocol

Radia Perlman, a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems, named as one of the 20 most influential people in the industry in the 25th anniversary issue of Data Communications magazine and the original inventor of the 802.1D spanning-tree specification recently had a few words to say about the protocol: “It’s time to redo (one of the Internet’s most widely used technologies) in a way that is more robust and gives more efficient paths.”1

Introducing Spanning Tree Protocol

Chapter 2, “Defeating a Learning Bridge’s Forwarding Process,” explained how Ethernet switches build their forwarding tables by learning source MAC addresses from data traffic. When an Ethernet frame arrives on a switch port in ...

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