Protection Against and Detecting Fingerprinting
Protection against all types of TCP/IP fingerprinting is achieved through TCP/IP fingerprint obfuscators. Also known as fingerprint scrubbing, tools exist for MS Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and likely others.
Moreover, protection against active fingerprinting attempts is achieved by limiting the type and amount of traffic a system responds to. Examples include the following: blocking of all unnecessary outgoing ICMP traffic, especially unusual packet types like address masks and timestamps. Also, blocking of any ICMP echo replies. Be warned that blocking things without knowing exactly what they are for can very well lead to a broken network; for instance, your network could become a black hole. Alternatively, active fingerprinting tools themselves have fingerprints that can be detected.
Defeating TCP/IP fingerprinting may provide limited protection from potential attackers who employ a vulnerability scanner to select machines of a specific target OS. However, a determined adversary may simply try a series of different attacks until one is successful.
Read more about this topic: TCP/IP Stack Fingerprinting
Famous quotes containing the words protection against, protection and/or detecting:
“A man with convictions finds an answer for everything. Convictions are the best form of protection against the living truth.”
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)
“No: until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In our Mechanics’ Fair, there must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenter’s planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer instruments,—rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)