Re: Latest status of Multicast Traceroute

Bill Fenner <[email protected]> Fri, 11 Feb 2005 09:07:12 -0800
Newsgroups gmane.ietf.idmr
Message-ID <[email protected]>
>What is status of multicast traceroute, both the Internet-Draft and mtrace? 

I just resubmitted the latest Internet-Draft.

>Is the effort to progress draft abandoned or transformed into other life
>form?  

It fell by the wayside because we never managed to finish addressing
concerns over whether or not hosts should be allowed to send these
packets - when we were initially ready to publish the spec, smurf
and other packet amplification attacks were getting popular and with
the "return this packet to arbitrary IP address" request, mtrace
could fall in that class.

The tension between wanting to allow arbitrary users to use the tool
(just like with unicast traceroute) and wanting to restrict it for
security meant that we never made any progress.

  Bill