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Re: pros and cons of RMX (Re: [Asrg] Declaration to the world)

2003-03-06 14:18:20
wayne wrote:
A) RMX is broken, due to reliance on DNS

Even with the birthday paradox attack, the spammer will have to send
out hundreds of forged DNS packets in order to have a good chance of
getting a bogus entry the target's DNS cache.  This is both very
detectable and it also greatly increases the amount of work that a
spammer has to do.

I've not been following this in great detail, but I'd like to comment on this point. It's worse than that. It has to trick every recipient.

It's rather like true IP spoofing. In some circumstances, it is indeed possible to spoof IPs. But since it requires flooding the MTA for each connection with thousands of packets, it becomes totally impractical if you're trying to spam more than a handful of recipients (even if you're on the same network interface as AOL's MTAs).

So, I don't think attacks on the DNS protocol are compelling. Subverting a DNS server is an entirely different thing.

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