Saturday, February 23, 2008

Should Spoofing be part of cyber crime law?

Faking the sending address of a transmission in order to gain illegal entry into a secure system is called spoofing or creating fake responses or signals in order to keep a session active and prevent timeouts.

Spoofing is categorized into following types
IP
ARP
MAC
DNS
E-mail
IP Spoofing
In IP spoofing, an attacker gains unauthorized access to a computer or a network by making it appear that a malicious message has come from a trusted machine by “spoofing” the IP address of that machine.

ARP Spoofing
The principle of ARP spoofing is to send fake, or 'spoofed', ARP messages to an Ethernet LAN. Generally, the aim is to associate the attacker's MAC address with the IP address of another node (such as the default gateway).

DNS Spoofing
DNS Spoofing is the art of making a DNS entry to point to an another IP than it would be supposed to point to.

E-mail Spoofing
The unauthorized use of a third-party domain name as the sender's name in an e-mail message. Most often used by spammers, spoofing the name of a popular retailer or organization entices the recipient to read the full message.

Mac Spoofing
MAC Address Spoofing to alter the manufacturer-assigned MAC address to a desired value.

Spoofing is defined as a part of cyber crime. According to the bill for the prevention of cyber crime
Whoever establishes a website, or sends an electronic message with a counterfeit
source intended to be believed by the recipient or visitor or its electronic system to be an authentic
source with intent to gain unauthorized access or obtain valuable information which later can be
used for any unlawful purposes commits the offence of spooling.
(2) Whoever commits the offence of spooling specified in sub-section (1) shall be punished with
imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three years, or with fine, or with
both
.”

In my opinion spoofing should not be the part of cyber crimes. First of all if spoofing is banned then privacy of a user will be affected.For example if mac spoofing is not allowed
· Then Many organizations track wired or wireless network users via their MAC Addresses.In addition, there are more and more Wireless connections available these days, and wireless network use MAC Addresses to communicate.Build true Stand-by (offline) systems with the exact same ComputerName, IP, and MAC address as the Primary Systems. If Stand-by systems should be put online, No ARP table refresh is necessary, which eliminates extra downtime. Some online Game Players (Gamers) require changing the MAC addresses to fix IP problems for some reason. Similarly there are certain situations where you need to hide your identity. It is also used to Troubleshoot system problems and Test network management tools and also for Testing incident response procedures on simulated network problems.E-mail spoofing is used by users who want to hide their identity and the reason may mot be spamming .

Also the law about the spoofing is not clear. As said by Mr Zahid Jamil the definitions are incomplete and vague. He has also given the example of an innocent person caught by the government due to cyber stalking. The law needs to be changed and clear in many aspects. It needs to be designed in such a way that only criminal is caught and not the innocent one.

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