On Tue, 6 May 2003 12:10:21 -0700 (PDT)
Michael Rubel <asrg(_at_)mikerubel(_dot_)org> wrote:
BoxA is compromised.
The zombie code sucks in a spamming engine (SE).
The SE determines the mail configuration of BoxA in terms of
appropriate SMTP envelope etc from the registry.
BoxA spams away using the stolen credentials from its registry.
Thank you--you've raised a reasonable, cogent objection.
Nope, there's nothing in there specific to RMX, RMX just prompted some
mental noodling which ended up with me doing some arm waving at future
attack vectors. RMX is broken for simpler reasons, which have been well
covered without my help.
As you note, RMX would not help against this kind of attack, and
frankly neither would any other proposal I'm aware of. If I can trick
your machine into thinking I'm you, then I can do bad things in your
name and thus make you look bad.
Quite. As I noted at the time, this is a core problem with edge
authentication schema, and isn't necessarily resolvable.
I submit that RMX gives a significant improvement, and it's just
simple/easy enough that people might start using it!
Deployment expenses with RMX are a significant problem, as are the ROI
curves related to percentage deployments and fundamental email use
costs. You can arm-wave technical solutions at them, but they merely
increase the deployment, support, and maintenance costs for a negative
ROI on the part of the deployer. You are attempting to recreate
top-down authority structures when the natural (and proper?) tendency of
the field in normal legitimate use is for
self-authenticating/identifying nodes, not external nomination systems.
<shrug>
Now, can we move on to digging out a proposal which has a chance of
being useful instead of beating dead horses?
--
J C Lawrence
---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw(_at_)kanga(_dot_)nu He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg