spoofing

spoofing

(1) Faking the sending address of a transmission in order to gain illegal entry into a secure system. See e-mail spoofing.

(2) Creating fake responses or signals in order to keep a session active and prevent timeouts. For example, mainframes continuously poll their terminals. If the lines to remote terminals are temporarily suspended because there is no traffic, a local device spoofs the host with "I'm still here" responses. See how to spoof your technical friend.

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spoofing [′spüf·iŋ]

(electronics)

Deceiving or misleading the enemy in electronic operations, as by continuing transmission on a frequency after it has been effectively jammed by the enemy, using decoy radar transmitters to lead the enemy into a useless jamming effort, or transmitting radio messages containing false information for intentional interception by the enemy.

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spoofing - A technique used to reduce network overhead, especially in wide area networks (WAN). Some network protocols send frequent packets for management purposes. These can be routing updates or keep-alive messages. In a WAN this can introduce significant overhead, due to the typically smaller bandwidth of WAN connections. Spoofing reduces the required bandwidth by having devices, such as bridges or routers, answer for the remote devices. This fools (spoofs) the LAN device into thinking the remote LAN is still connected, even though it's not. The spoofing saves the WAN bandwidth, because no packet is ever sent out on the WAN. LAN protocols today do not yet accommodate spoofing easily. ["Network Spoofing" by Jeffrey Fritz, BYTE, December 1994, pages 221 - 224].