hi.
throughout the years occasionally there is talk of net riding, and the infamous, super hero sounding, net rider.
this email is simply a request for a bit of background information and/or history on what exactly net riding is. because i've always been interested but have never actually known what it is.
i'd also be interested to know how undernet prevent net riding.
thanks.
Heh :)
Net Riding is getting ops in a channel by connecting to a split server where no-one is on the channel so the server gives you ops.. when the server rejoins, if you keep ops, you are a "net rider"
Undernet prevents this in a number of ways, mainly thru the use of channel timestamps. When a channel is created (ie joined when empty), it is given a timestamp, when a server rejoins the network, it renegotiates with it's new peer the timestamp of each channel.. the op list belonging to the instance of the channel with the oldest timestamp overrules. Other networks have only recently aadopted timestamp techniques, meaning that it used to be necessary to make clients de-op other clients receiving ops from servers.
Undernet also hides interserver links including which servers are connected, thus preventing people from finding split servers and possibily exploiting server bugs and doing something which might "hack" the timestamp protocol and keeping ops or otherwise disrupting the network when it rejoins, though this is very unlikely given the maturity of Undernet's code, with the current codebase started about 7 years ago.
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