How to tell which interface the socket received the message from?

Question

If a socket is bound to IN6ADDR_ANY or INADDR_ANY and you use a call such as recvfrom() to receive messages on the socket. Is there a way to find out which interface the message came from?

In the case of IPv6 link-scope messages, I was hoping that the from argument of recvfrom() would have the scope_id field initialized to the interface Id. Unfortunately it is set to 0 in my test program.

Anybody know of a way to find out this information?

Answer 1

I've constructed an example that extracts the source, destination and interface addresses. For brevity, no error checking is provided. See this duplicate: Get destination address of a received UDP packet.

// sock is bound AF_INET socket, usually SOCK_DGRAM
// include struct in_pktinfo in the message "ancilliary" control data
setsockopt(sock, IPPROTO_IP, IP_PKTINFO, &opt, sizeof(opt));
// the control data is dumped here
char cmbuf[0x100];
// the remote/source sockaddr is put here
struct sockaddr_in peeraddr;
// if you want access to the data you need to init the msg_iovec fields
struct msghdr mh = {
    .msg_name = &peeraddr,
    .msg_namelen = sizeof(peeraddr),
    .msg_control = cmbuf,
    .msg_controllen = sizeof(cmbuf),
};
recvmsg(sock, &mh, 0);
for ( // iterate through all the control headers
    struct cmsghdr *cmsg = CMSG_FIRSTHDR(&mh);
    cmsg != NULL;
    cmsg = CMSG_NXTHDR(&mh, cmsg))
{
    // ignore the control headers that don't match what we want
    if (cmsg->cmsg_level != IPPROTO_IP ||
        cmsg->cmsg_type != IP_PKTINFO)
    {
        continue;
    }
    struct in_pktinfo *pi = CMSG_DATA(cmsg);
    // at this point, peeraddr is the source sockaddr
    // pi->ipi_spec_dst is the destination in_addr
    // pi->ipi_addr is the receiving interface in_addr
}