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Drop gratuitous ARP packets#291

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adrelanos merged 1 commit intoKicksecure:masterfrom
raja-grewal:drop_gratuitous_arp
Jan 10, 2025
Merged

Drop gratuitous ARP packets#291
adrelanos merged 1 commit intoKicksecure:masterfrom
raja-grewal:drop_gratuitous_arp

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@raja-grewal
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As per #279 (comment).

Changes

Set sysctl net.ipv4.conf.*.drop_gratuitous_arp=1

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@ArrayBolt3
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Doesn't look like it's likely to cause problems in a home use scenario, but what happens in a cloud scenario where you rely on other servers on the local network for certain resources, and those servers sometimes have their MAC addresses change? (I don't know if AWS ever has to change the MAC addresses of things like package update servers and whatnot, but I would assume it could happen if they're shuffling VMs around.) That could cause things to break, possibly quite badly. I can also imagine something like this happening in a corporate scenario where a server is reconfigured and it has to tell all client machines on the network the new MAC address for its IP.

I think for most users this is probably fine, since IPs don't just randomly switch MACs very often AFAIK. In an environment where gratuitous ARP is needed, the sysadmin will probably know, and be able to turn this setting off. So I think this is another thing that's good to enable by default, but that we should support disabling, and document how to turn it off.

@raja-grewal
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raja-grewal commented Jan 8, 2025

Thanks for the review!

Personally, I am not sure how many people use Kicksecure/Whonix in a cloud scenario. I think the majority off users are either running VMs on their personal system or running it on bare metal on their personal systems.

As you suggest, I think for the cloud scenario, a user in that space would likely know how to handle the problem.

Regardless, do you think the current documentation is sufficiently clear for a user?

@ArrayBolt3
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The in-file documentation is fine to me, but I'd also like to document it in the wiki so people who are like "what on earth, why can't my workstation find my server anymore" can do a web search or wiki search and (hopefully) find it. I can add that to my list of things to do

@adrelanos I consider this ready to merge.

@adrelanos adrelanos merged commit 1b33e83 into Kicksecure:master Jan 10, 2025
@raja-grewal raja-grewal deleted the drop_gratuitous_arp branch January 11, 2025 01:56
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