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I would like to completely disable UDP packets from exiting or entering my computer(Ubuntu 11.04), how would I go about doing this? What are the downsides to disabling UDP packets? The reason for doing this is to prevent my real IP from being broadcasted.

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    One important service that uses UDP is DNS. So turning off UDP will prevent most applications from resolving domain names to IP addresses. What makes you think that UDP is going to leak more information about your machine than TCP based protocols?
    – James Henstridge
    Sep 3, 2011 at 7:12
  • Well i'm going to be using Tor for all TCP related requests.
    – Glenn Dayton
    Sep 3, 2011 at 7:53
  • Disabling UDP is something else than disabling broadcast. If you're really worried about your privacy, set up a good firewall.
    – Lekensteyn
    Sep 3, 2011 at 8:37

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  1. You can stop your system from receiving UDP packets by doing a

    sudo lsof -i UDP

and killing the processes that have open UDP sockets (all the processes listed),IF YOU'RE SURE YOU DON'T NEED THEM! I'm almost sure that you need them.

  1. The only way to stop your system from sending UDP packets is to not run any program that uses UDP. I have no idea how you can do this.

This being said, I must confess that, in my 45 year career as a sysadmin on Unix and Linux with the last 20 years in security, I've NEVER encountered a situation where turning off UDP was a good idea. It seems like you're trying to secure your system by randomly turning things off, without understanding what you're doing, or how security works. Please don't.

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