ietf-mxcomp
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: onus on mailing lists

2004-03-18 17:30:19

On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 06:01:17PM -0500, Philip Miller wrote:
You're thinking of checking the wrong message against LMAP criteria. It 
looks like you're thinking of validating the unsubscribe request, while 
Meng was talking about only trusting List-* headers in messages that have 
passed LMAP validation.

Why? With double-ACK it is absolutely irrelevant, either of those.
If this message would fake List-Unsubscribe for the ietf-asrg list,
and I would hit unsubscribe, so what? I'd get a message from ietf-asrg
to confirm the unsubscribe, and I would think "just a second, what?"
and I would of course not send the ACK.
If the list admin set up the list for unsubscribe without ACK it
doesn't make a difference either, as I can probably right now unsubscribe
all those who sent a message to this list from the list (it's just a grep
in my mailbox and 3 lines of shell).
So checking List-* against LMAP is not how to make mailing lists more
secure and protect them from evil sent unsubscribes.

And it should definitely not be done by a MTA. If someone wants he can
even check Message-Ids against LMAP at user level ;-)

        \Maex

-- 
SpaceNet AG            | Joseph-Dollinger-Bogen 14 | Fon: +49 (89) 32356-0
Research & Development |       D-80807 Muenchen    | Fax: +49 (89) 32356-299
"The security, stability and reliability of a computer system is reciprocally
 proportional to the amount of vacuity between the ears of the admin"


<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>