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This only needs to work on a single subnet and is not for malicious use.
I have a load testing tool written in Python that basically blasts HTTP requests at a URL. I need to run performance tests against an IP-based load balancer, so the requests must come from a range of IP's. Most commercial performance tools provide this functionality, but I want to build it into my own.
The tool uses Python's urllib2 for transport. Is it possible to send HTTP requests with spoofed IP addresses for the packets making up the request?
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No you can't. HTTP is a protocol on top of TCP and doing IP spoofing with TCP is nearly impossible due to the internals of the protocol.
Internet Protocol (IP) spoofing is a type of malicious attack where the threat actor hides the true source of IP packets to make it difficult to know where they came from. The attacker creates packets, changing the source IP address to impersonate a different computer system, disguise the sender's identity or both.
Just about anything in HTTP can be spoofed. The level of 'spoofability' is hard to determine. It's fairly trivial to craft a request with any header value I desire.
In a DDoS attack, hackers use spoofed IP addresses to overwhelm computer servers with packets of data. This allows them to slow down or crash a website or network with large volumes of internet traffic while concealing their identity. IP spoofing can be used to obtain access to computers by masking botnets.
This is a misunderstanding of HTTP. The HTTP protocol is based on top of TCP. The TCP protocol relies on a 3 way handshake to initialize requests.
alt text http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/c/c7/20051221162333!300px-Tcp-handshake.png
Needless to say, if you spoof your originating IP address, you will never get past the synchronization stage and no HTTP information will be sent (the server can't send it to a legal host).
If you need to test an IP load balancer, this is not the way to do it.
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