data request on Sitefinder

Mon Oct 20 21:29:15 UTC 2003

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 17:15:23 -0400 "Howard C. Berkowitz" <hcb at gettcomm.com> 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 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                                         rwelty at averillpark.net
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
    Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security