Re:Privileged Ports Are Expensive (2016)
by JdeBP on Sunday July 09, 2017 @08:12AM
(#14729377)
Hosts are not presumed to have only one IP address. This is a mistake that people make. (They often made it with djbdns, hence https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ifconfig.html .) But it has never actually been the case. Indeed, one can find discussions of hosts that have multiple IP addresses in RFC 1122 and discussion that IP addresses do not have a 1:1 correspondence with network interfaces in RFC 791.
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Details. In practice, few applications do interesting things when binding to multiple IP addresses. Itβs like a special case of single IP address.
Perhaps I should phrase it, there is no fundamental reason why IP addresses are associated with hosts rather than users, or even services. There is no fundamental reason why you need to be root to listen to privileged ports, which includes many of the most useful ports.