Silence on the Wire

Attacking the Architecture

The mechanisms discussed so far were engineered to improve the bottom line while providing high performance, on top of a network design that provides no security features whatsoever.^[69] Although certain common, well-understood, and easy-to-prevent attacks, such as MAC spoofing (the ability for any person to spoof an ARP message and impersonate a device with a particular IP) are widely recognized as a pitfall of local area networking and are easy to prevent with properly configured switches, some other serious design flaws are not so trivial and, in fact, not prevented so easily. It is not always obvious that solutions commonly perceived as designed to improve security in fact do nothing to help it.

CAM and Traffic Interception ...