zlacker

Unless you had a special case for the hijacking machines to ignore the spoofed ARPs, the whole thing probably fell apart when they ended up with a loop between each other rather than a path to the real gateway.

>>kortil+(OP)
Oh, yeah. That's a very good point. That's probably why it stopped working. I always thought the network admins pulled the plug assuming they'd been hacked.

>>bfirsh+J
That's a common issue with distributed systems.

Something has to be "the leader" and you need a system for choosing a new one once the old one is offline for a certain amount of time.

Add in a sprinkling of how to figure out if you have more than one leader active at a time.

>>WrtCdE+v1
Would it have needed leader election though? It's a stateless system. It might have been enough to ignore spoofed ARP replies, or to not attack machines of its own kind.

>>bfirsh+B4
Yeah, even in state systems, i think some sort of gossip protocol could work as long as the part of the state is being decided on is not in contention with another nodes response during a round of sampling.