Windows routing table...

yosi199

Hi guys, I'm here once more with another few questions - what is the routing table? how can I use it? what security aspects does it have?

any help?

as usually - thanks!

dynamik

The routing table instructs Windows where to send packets for various destination networks. It may be something simple like simply having a route to your default gateway, or you may need to add custom entries for numerous networks. Suppose you establish a VPN connection to your company, and the VPN operates on the 10.0.0.x network. There might be another corporate network behind that (i.e. 172.16.1.x). However, Windows isn't going to have any knowledge of that by default, and will attempt to send that over the default gateway (which will fail). You'd need to create an entry for that, so Windows would know to route traffic for that destination network through the VPN connection and not the default gateway.

Security implications would be that if you could somehow poison a routing table, you could do something like create a man-in-the-middle situation and route all (or some) of a victim machine's traffic through you, and you would be able to capture and analyze that traffic.

Met44

The general idea of routing is when you have an outgoing packet, you look up the destination IP address in the routing table to determine which interface to send that packet out of. (This is true until you learn about policy routing, which is beyond the scope of the Security+.)

Google around a bit to get the basic idea. Wikipedia has good articles on "routing" and "routing table".

In Windows, you should be able to view your routing table with the "route print" command, or nestat -r.