While zeroconf networking is an exciting new technology capable of making many tasks much easier, and making some tasks possible at all, it is not without its problems. This section provides a brief overview of some of the more important issues.
The way in which link-local networking works is subtly different to the way in which IP addresses can normally be treated, since link-local traffic is never routed. This can be a serious issue for hosts that are communicating using link-local addresses to some hosts, and using routable addresses to other hosts. In this case, it is quite possible that referals based on IP addresses may end up failing in unexpected ways.
The fact that IP addresses are only unique on a single link (at least in the IPv4 case) can be problematic for hosts that have more than one interface. As an example, consider two links (1 and 2), which have three hosts (A, B and C). A is on link 1, C is on link 2, and B is multi-homed on both links using two different interfaces. There is no reason why A and C cannot have the same link-local address. However this makes things complex for B, which cannot use IP address alone to identify a host. There is a workaround for this, however it needs to be implemented at the application layer.
Zeroconf networks cannot provide protection against some important forms of information security attack. In particular, it is not possible to protect from "man-in-the-middle" attacks without some form of out-of-band configuration.
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