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Re: Replay attacks and ISP business models

2005-08-07 12:51:24

John Levine wrote:
It almost seems that replay can be detected just by monitoring the
number of queries against a user key.


Only if you know in advance how many times a message will legitimately
be delivered and can see through the recipients' DNS caches to know
how many times a key was fetched, neither of which seems very likely.

Before we can describe a replay defense, the people who are concerned
about replay need to define what replay means, i.e., what's the
technical difference between a replay and a valid delivery.  The
definition can't require knowledge of people's mental states.

I agree. I think that the thing that really ought to
be proven here is whether "replay" is a real threat or
not. At this point, it is purely academic and I think we
have a pretty spotty track record of determining what the
miscreants next steps will actually be. For one, it's not
clear that if domains -- in an effort to maintain their
reputation -- start spam-filtering their outbound mail,
you'd reduce the effectiveness of the so-called replay
attack by about 2 orders of magnitude. It seems to me that
it's pretty likely that they'll find something else to do
if that scenario plays out.

                Mike

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