PrECast: an efficient crypto-free solution for broadcast-based attacks in IPv4 networks

Broadcasting is one of the essential features in the Internet Protocol Ver 4 (IPv4). Attackers often exploit this feature of the IP protocol to launch several attacks against a network or an individual host. Attackers may either be a part of a Local Area Network (LAN) or outside a LAN to launch these attacks. There are numerous papers available in the literature to solve problems resulting from IP broadcasting. However, all these solutions target a specific problem that results from IP broadcasting. Furthermore, these solutions use either a computationally-intensive cryptographic scheme, the a priori relation between the host and the network or a modified protocol stack at every host. In this paper, we provide a seamless and transparent solution to eliminate IP broadcasting and thus eliminate all problems related to IP broadcasting. Our proposed solution is crypto-free and does not need any modification to the protocol stack.