ARP flooding is defined as

• A. Sending many ARP requests to overwhelm a network
• B. Sending ARP replies randomly
• C. Preventing ARP traffic from leaving a segment
• D. Storing ARP entries for too long

Answer: (A)

ARP flood means overwhelming the network by generating a large volume of ARP requests. ARP maps IP addresses to MAC addresses on the local network, and ARP requests are broadcast to all devices. When many of these requests are sent, the network experiences a flood of broadcast frames that every host and network device must process, which can saturate bandwidth and exhaust memory or CPU resources in switches and routers, leading to degraded performance or a denial of service. While ARP replies can be part of other issues, the typical flooding method relies on a surge of ARP requests to maximize broadcast traffic. The other options describe different ARP-related problems (such as ARP replies sent randomly, traffic being blocked from leaving a segment, or ARP cache entries persisting too long) and do not capture the flooding behavior.