Same host or different? How can you tell "over the wire"?

[Andreas Scherrer]

Hi rfg

On 21.03.18 22:19, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:

...

> Is there any method which can be applied to A and A' over the
> Internet and which could reliably differentiate these two possible
> cases from one another (i.e. a single common host versus two separate
> hosts)?

That is an interesting question (or thought experiment). I would say the 
answer is unfortunately a boring "no".

Assuming that there IS such a method, it would have to make the decision 
based on (a set of) "features" in the network traffic it sees.
Now there MUST be something that can be changed/mangled/tuned in the 
traffic that is generated by a single machine to trick the scanner into 
thinking that it is looking at two different machines. Whatever the 
"features" are, changing at least one of them must be possible.

Or am I missing something?


Cheers
andreas