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by ajross 2388 days ago
IP addresses don't "belong" to interfaces in the general case. It's just a hard problem. In fact there are lots of multi-homed use cases where you want to internally route packets across interfaces without an affirmative mapping of what address is supposed to be used where.

For the specific case of point to point VPNs, there's a rule that makes sense. But that's not part of the network stack per se and there's no way to enforce it generically.

2 comments

Do network stacks drop 127.0/8 packets from external interfaces today? Superficially (I'm not an experienced TCP/IP or routing stack developer, although I do work in the kernel) it seems like the same treatment could be used for VPN-registered interface addresses. You just need an API to specify "I'm a VPN interface" when the device is created or the IP assigned, no?
Is there a place where I can read about these cases?