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How would it? IP has no concept of “Internal IP addressees”. There are reserved private address spaces, reserved local address spaces, and reserved public addre
by avianlyric 4y ago
How would it? IP has no concept of “Internal IP addressees”. There are reserved private address spaces, reserved local address spaces, and reserved public address spaces.
Both the private and public address spaces can be used for “Internal Addresses”. The fact that we frequently use NATs and private address spaces to work around IPv4 exhaustion does not mean you can expect all “Internal Addresses” to be in a private range.
The second you start using IPv6, or your in an old internet environment like a University, the DoD etc who has huge IPv4 address space, then you’ll find every machine has a IP address in a public range, there’s just firewalls preventing inbound connections, but you can’t easily detect those firewalls from the client.
- xxs 4y ago>IP has no concept of “Internal IP addressees”. IPv4 has defined 10/8, 172.16/12, 192.168/16 as site-local (or internal). IPv6 has similar concept with fec0:/10
- tatersolid 4y agoMany organizations use “real” publicly routable addresses on their hosts for IPv4 (rare) and IPv6 (common), without NAT devices. Stateful firewalls don’t require the use of NAT.
- fulafel 4y agoThose v4 examples are really ambiguous addresses, orthogonal to local-ness. Same goes for ambiguous addresses used in CGNAT. More importantly, the complement: you don't know that a non-rfc1918 address isn't local. This is important because the latter is actually the definition the proposed "only allow non-local" use case would require. (Also fec00::/10 was deprecated 15+ years ago - there are still some special prefixes like ULA but for IPv6 their usage is marginal since there's no shortage of normal address space)
- xxs 4y agoThe argument was about having a concept, not ensuring any address is publicly available.
- avianlyric 4y agoOnly if you completely ignore the preceding discussion about same-origin policies, and how browsers can’t provide a guarantee that a host at particular IP address is a public system or an internal-only system. A host with an IP in a private range might always be internal, but a host with an IP in a public range isn’t always external. And as the stated goal is to avoid browsers being a trampoline to attack internal equipment, not being able to guarantee that a particular host is an internal host is problematic.