[More appropriate on IIU or technobabble...]
> exactly how bad is this?
>> it's ugly, but is it bad?
IMHO, yes. Remember that the private address that
you leak could be in use within the network of the machine
that sees it. So, say for example, you advertise 192.168.1.1
to the world. A machine in Ugabu Inc in Botswandu also has
this address. Another machine in Ugabu, for some reason, tries
to connect to your 192.168.1.1 (for, say, a DNS or HTTP request),
but instead gets Ugabu's own 192.168.1.1 machine. At best, the
error message (if present) will be confusing to the user and the
Ugabu sysadmin may be scratching his head for a while. At worst,
you could, theoretically, cause much more damage. I'll leave
the elaboration of this for the guys on vuln-dev or Bugtraq :-)
Basically don't do it.
...and I'll tell Kevin if you do :-)
Later,
Kenn
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