IP address
An IP address serves two principal functions. It identifies the host, or more specifically its network interface, and it provides the location of the host in the network, and thus the capability of establishing a path to that host. Its role has been characterized as follows: "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how to get there."
The header of each IP packet contains the IP address of the sending host, and that of the destination host.
Ping of death
When fragmentation is performed, each IP fragment needs to carry information about which part of the original IP packet it contains. This information is kept in the Fragment Offset field, in the IP header. The field is 13 bits long, and contains the offset of the data in the current IP fragment, in the original IP packet. The offset is given in units of 8 bytes. This allows a maximum offset of 65,528 ((2-1)*8). Then when adding 20 bytes of IP header, the maximum will be 65,548 bytes, which exceeds the maximum frame size. This means that an IP fragment with the maximum offset should have data no larger than 7 bytes, or else it would exceed the limit of the maximum packet length. A malicious user can send an IP fragment with the maximum offset and with much more data than 8 bytes (as large as the physical layer allows it to be).