Re: Public Policy and Consumer ISP Hygiene (was Comcast pop-ups)

[Dan White <dwhite () olp net>]

On 13/10/09 10:58 -0400, Rich Kulawiec wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 09:27:46AM -0500, Dan White wrote:
> > Sure it would. The idea of an IPSEC enabled PKI is that you have end-to-end
> > security, with perhaps many untrusted networks in the middle. It means
> > two-way trust. 
>
> Which is a nice idea, but increasingly meaningless in a world where there
> are, at minimum, a hundred million already-compromised systems (I think 200M
> is now a better low-end estimate), more every day, and every possible reason
> to expect this problem to keep getting worse.
>
> End-to-end security is worthless if one end is already enemy territory.

There is a difference. SMTP is not based on end-to-end security. It's based
on a chain of trust, and most of the chains have absolutely no security -
if I send email to AOL, they pretty much have to trust me. I don't verify
who I am. If I'm an ISP and I accept email from a customer (because they're
on my network, or they authenticate to me), I relay their email to AOL, and
I can't reliably tell that it's SPAM.

To compound the issue, the From and To headers don't really have anything
to do with how emails get routed, which still confuses my customers - "but
someone must have hacked my email account. They sent an email to someone
else as me, and the bounce came back to me instead!"

If email was based on end-to-end security, then SPAM is a problem between
two specific users of the internet (my residential broadband customer and
an AOL user). I don't have much care in whether that AOL user stops
accepting email from my user. But I certainly *do* care of AOL stops
accepting all email from all of my customers because they've decided to
blacklist our relay server.

To be fair, AOL is really good about not letting this happen, but a lot of
other providers depend on 3rd party lists when determining who not to
accept email from.

SMTP needs to go away, and be replaced by something that resembles
end-to-end messaging passing, rather than the horrible touchy feely
pseudo-chain-of-trust that it is today.

-- 
Dan White
_______________________________________________
Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts.
https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec
Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.