Re: Chain of Trusted Forwarders
2005-05-29 03:14:52
At 12:46 AM 5/29/2005 -0400, Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu wrote:
On Sat, 28 May 2005 16:45:40 PDT, David MacQuigg said:
> Spammer --> Forwarder1 --> Forwarder2 --> Receiver
>
> A Trusted Forwarder will authenticate the ID presented by the
Spammer. The
> Receiver will look at that ID, and rate it just as if the Spammer had
> connected directly to the Receiver. If one of the Trusted Forwarders
> messes up an authentication, then that forwarder loses reputation.
Exactly. So every time Forwarder*2* accepts a bogus one, *it* loses...
Forwarders are not responsible for content. The only way Forwarder2 loses,
is if it fails to authenticate Forwarder1.
> The game could get a little more complicated if Forwarder1 is the spammer's
The whole point is that Forwarder1 can be *assumed* to be the spammer's...
> friend, but not much. About the fifth time a rating service has to deal
> with a he-said-she-said situation involving Forwarder1, it will be pretty
> clear who is faking authentication headers.
And after a long run of Forwarder1A..Forwarder1Q.., Forwarder2 is starting to
look pretty shaky in the reputation market as well. Remember that we're
talking
here about a class of opponents that have *literally* hundreds of thousands of
drones to enlist, and throwing tens of millions of bogus authentications.
"About the 5th time" gets you through the first 35 seconds of a concerted
attack
against the reputation mechanism, if *that* long.
And don't bother suggesting "slow-start" mechanisms for setting up
reputations -
the spammers are *already* sometimes lining up domains and zombies well in
advance
of the run they are to be used for. There's no reason to believe they *won't*
engage in a ramp-up of bouncing totally pointless mail back and forth just to
drive up their reputation score before they make their spam run...
Now we are getting to some good stuff, and I will admit I haven't thought
through all the details.
Let's assume authentication works perfectly, so we are looking just at the
cost/benefit to spammers of acquiring/burning reputable IDs. Let's also
ignore the occasional hijacking of a reputable ID. As you say, this must
be a production process involving large numbers of names. Let's look at
the benefit first, as that seems easiest. The system I imagine would give
a spammer about an hour of operation with a B-rated ID before the downgrade
notification propagates to all that care about a quick response.
The real question is, how easy will it be for spammers to move their
plentiful supply of C-rated (unknown) IDs up to B (trusted, but not yet
proven). If I were a reputation service, considering an applicant for a B
rating, I would take a corporate registration as sufficient. This is
easily checked, and will cover almost all wannabe operators of Public Mail
Servers. For individuals, I would insist on a face-to-face with someone I
trust, maybe one of my subscriber ISPs in the same town. My representative
could copy the individuals driver's license and credit cards, and snap his
picture. I would also run a check of credit and police records.
The fee for this service might include a bond, to be returned after the
first six months of operation. I really don't care if individual
applicants find this burdensome. My customers are email receivers, and I
don't think I will lose much business if a few individuals decide that
using a reputable ISP to forward their mail is easier than getting a
"license" to operate their own Public Mail Server.
--
Dave
************************************************************ *
* David MacQuigg, PhD email: david_macquigg at yahoo.com * *
* IC Design Engineer phone: USA 520-721-4583 * * *
* Analog Design Methodologies * * *
* 9320 East Mikelyn Lane * * *
* VRS Consulting, P.C. Tucson, Arizona 85710 *
************************************************************ *
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David MacQuigg <=
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