Is there a way to make an android device answer to icmp pings addressed to the broadcast address?

Question

I would like to programatically make my device answer to broadcast pings (i.e pinging 192.178.1.255) while connected to a wifi network.

Is there a way i can do that ? Maybe a listener that will ping back, or a flag to set somewhere?

Thanks.

A ping that is addressed to the broadcast address of the subnet, for instance 192.168.1.255 on a 192.168.1.0 network. — Intrepidd, Nov 04 '12 at 14:51
I think it's worth noting that responding to pings lets attackers know you exist if they are brute forcing devices. — samdoj, Aug 08 '16 at 20:05

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:51

5

Is there a way i can do that ?

In short: Yes. But it will take some good effort to integrate the necessary components.

The key problem is that you need to listen for ICMP network packets. Such functionality is not accessible from Java and would require either JNI code or an external program. (To my knowledge, it also requires a rooted device.)

You will need a library or program that can process network traffic, such as Jpcap (which would require some modification to work on Android). You could also install and run an instance of tcpdump in the background and parse its output.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:51

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answered Nov 04 '12 at 15:23

acj

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Best answer, thank you. I will probably use multicast as @forgemo pointed out. – Intrepidd Nov 04 '12 at 16:29

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 04 '12 at 16:06

It's not possible for an app to send/receive ICMP Echo Requests on Android. (Maybe there is a way on rooted devices)

But if your basic goal is to implement some kind of local device discovery functionality (and your code runs on all devices), you can use UDP broad/multicast messages instead.

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Sep 20 '20 at 15:05

I know this question is quite old now, but I came across this looking to for an answer and managed to work it out myself.

What I did was download a root file explorer (I used Root Browser from JRummy Apps) and navigate to /proc/sys/net/ipv4 edit icmp_echo_ignore_all so that it is a 1-line, 1-character file that simply says 0 (when I opened the file, it was set to 1)

No reboot, ICMP requests started working upon saving.

Is there a way to make an android device answer to icmp pings addressed to the broadcast address?

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