announcement may be either request or reply; the ARP standard specifies that the opcode is only processed after the ARP table has been updated from the address fields. Many operating systems issue an ARP announcement during startup. This helps to resolve problems which would otherwise occur if, for example, a network card was recently changed (changing the IP-address-to-MAC-address mapping) and other hosts still have the old mapping in their ARP caches. ARP announcements are also used by some network interfaces to provide load balancing for incoming traffic. In a team of network cards, it is used to announce a different MAC address within the team that should receive incoming packets. ARP announcements can be used in the Zeroconf protocol to allow automatic assignment of a link-local address to an interface where no other IP address configuration is available. The announcements are used to ensure an address chosen by a host is not in use by other hosts on the network link. This function can be dangerous from a cybersecurity viewpoint since an attacker can obtain information about the other hosts of its subnet to save in their ARP cache (ARP spoofing) an entry where the attacker MAC is associated, for instance, to the IP of the default gateway, thus allowing him to intercept all the traffic to external networks. ARP mediationARP mediation refers to the process of resolving Layer-2 addresses through a virtual private wire service (VPWS) when different resolution protocols are used on the connected circuits, e.g., Ethernet on one end and Frame Relay on the other. In IPv4, each provider edge (PE) device discovers the IP address of the locally attached customer edge (CE) device and distributes that IP address to the corresponding remote PE device. Then each PE device responds to local ARP requests using the IP address of the remote CE device and the hardware address of the local PE device. In IPv6, each PE device discovers the IP address of both local and remote CE devices and then intercepts local Neighbor Discovery (ND) and Inverse Neighbor Discovery (IND) packets and forwards them to the remote PE device. Inverse ARP and Reverse ARPInverse Address Resolution Protocol (Inverse ARP or InARP''') is used to obtain network layer addresses (for example, IP addresses) of other nodes from data link layer (Layer 2) addresses. Since ARP translates layer-3 addresses to layer-2 addresses, InARP may be described as its inverse.