Covert Channel: ASCII Art Over ICMP

An anonymous reader writes "Have you ever had a particularly lossy Cisco ping, which you were sure was trying to tell you something? I mean, really *tell* you something. Echoart allows you to return a simple ascii art image in response to a Cisco-style ping."

Comments

From echoart.c...

[tcopeland]

...around line 174:

// let's not do ipv6 just yet
if(version != 4) {
return;
}

That's v0.2, maybe :-)

Did this on port 23, once.. sort of.

[Xzzy]

I did up a silly perl script, using curses, that ran an ascii art animation of stick figure A throwing a grenade at stick figure B.

I, the guy that owned the machine, was figure A. The guy trying to telnet to my machine was figure B. After figure B was reduced to a crater I printed some message along the lines of "you aren't welcome here, go away".

Ran it out of hosts.deny and left it up for quite a while. I was bored, sounded more fun than setting up a firewall like I should have. ;)

It worked surprisingly well, even with the windows telnet client.

Re:This seems...

[Chalybeous]

Lots of potential for unique idents, a revival of the old ASCII art, and a return of classic IRC "finger" gags to the mainstream - what more could you want?

(The IRC thing - well, a friend of mine used to have ASCII art of a hand throwing the finger. Thus, anyone who fingered him got fingered in return...)

IMHO this does, as parent says, seem like a very cool and very harmless bit of fun screwing with corporate level technology. It would also have a good place in the corporate market - if, say, MS incorporated something similar into Longhorn, it could use a Windows logo as its default reply, or various Linux distros could use a Tux, a BSD demon, or a fedora. Other brand-name companies could work an ASCII version of their logo into it.
(Not to mention, you could also use those 70 lines to advertise - provide your company's contact info, or if you're a hosting company, give your pingers a free list of your latest packages. But how long til someone abuses it? Sure, the goatse guy is OK as net humour, but how long til we're fighting off idiots who want to incorporate spam messages in these ping responses?)