I just noticed your reply but thanks, I agree that source filtering at the OS level would accomplish the same thing, be more flexible, and be more consistent with existing practice.<p>I think the main additional assumption I have to (part of) what you describe is that applications (on a general purpose system) cannot be trusted to behave reasonably on the network, however users need insecure local networking to work.  The public&#x2F;private disctinction would work the way I imagined it, but only because I was assuming a limited form of source address filtering: essentially one bit on every interface (including VPNs) for &quot;is this local&quot; (I also assume separate addresses per interface).  The second address is so that so wildcard listening only listens on local addresses, and explicit public addresses need to be specified (or otherwise enabled) by the user before a server will listen on it.  I didn&#x27;t realize that just doing source address filtering as you suggest could accomplish the same thing with one address in a much simpler way.