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Re[3]: data request on Sitefinder

  • From: Howard C. Berkowitz
  • Date: Mon Oct 20 20:11:50 2003


On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 17:15:23 -0400 "Howard C. Berkowitz" <[email protected]> wrote:
 At 5:04 PM -0400 10/20/03, Richard Welty wrote:
 >may i suggest another operational issue then?

 >how does verisign plan to identify and notify all affected parties
 >when changes
 >are proposed?

 >for example, in the current case, how do they plan to identify every
 >party running
 >postfix and inform them that they need to upgrade their MTA?

 >this seems non-trivial to me.

 Purely from an operational standpoint, it would be a mark of
 efficiency to have a central repository of who is running what.  That
 would mean that notifications would only be sent to those that need
 them, and also would provide objective information to determine how
 many organizations would be affected by a change.  In other words,
 something that actually would be useful.
i maintain that building this list is phenomenonally difficult. the set of
people running mail servers is substantially larger than the set of
people who read nanog, run backbones, run regional ISPs, etc., etc.
I don't really disagree with you, even ignoring that many providers would consider much of this information proprietary, much as they might for private peering arrangements. This is something of a thought experiment on what would have to be available for a Verisign or the like to make unilateral changes without presenting the idea for comment, well in advance.

The process of asking for comment through IETF and the operational forums has the proven benefit of getting major players to look at the issue and decide to comment. Now, as you point out, there are many people who run mail servers and the like, who don't follow any relevant mailing lists.

I would suggest, however, that the number of people that do read these lists run mail servers with more end users than the small system administrators that do not.

The absence of a list such as I've described, the difficulty of creating of which you point out, makes it more unlikely to me that an organization can really assess the effects of unilateral design changes, especially when that assessment is shrouded in commercial secrecy.

i don't disagree that it would be useful, but how are you going to
build it without actively probing mail servers across the internet?
and it can't possibly ever be complete, with PIX firewalls obscuring
SMTP banners and sysadmins depending on security-by-obscurity
who change their banners to elminate MTA identification.

richard
--
Richard Welty                                         [email protected]
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
    Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security