IP: Re: Stanford Tracking Racist E-Mails

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> Date: Thu, 03 Jun 1999 23:51:14 -0700
> From: Jeff Hodges <Jeff.Hodges () Stanford edu>
> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (WinNT; U)
> X-Accept-Language: en
> To: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
> CC: Jeff Hodges <Jeff.Hodges () Stanford edu>
> Subject: Re: Stanford Tracking Racist E-Mails
>
> A good article about the incident is here..
>
>   http://daily.stanford.org/Daily98-99/6-2-1999/news/NEWe-mail02.html
>
>   ..and another is here..
>
>   http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/june2/email-62.html
>
> This is seemingly an instance of a "masquerade attack" wherein the intended
> victim is the person who's account the email message apparently originated
> from, and everyone who received the unsavory (in this case) message are
> secondary victims. 
>
> This isn't the only masquerade attack we've had, according to our security
> officer, but it's the most visible (that I can recall).
>
> I won't be surprised to see this sort of attack become more pervasive as more
> people figure out how easy it is to forge "plain" email messages. Of course,
> strong-crypto-based integrity and attribution assurances will help mitigate
> this, but we need the tools and infrastructure to support that to be
> pervasive. And that isn't going to happen soon given the government's current
> stance toward crypto. 
>
> Jeff
> http://www.stanford.edu/~hodges/