Blacklisting: obvious P2P app

Wed Sep 24 18:21:23 UTC 2003



    It has been mentioned in other places on the net (ok, yammerings on 
slashdot, but this made a bit of sense) that blacklisting is a perfect 
P2P application.

    Each mailserver could keep a cryptographically verified list, the 
list is distributed via some P2P mechanism, and DoS directed at the 
'source' of the service only interrupts updates, and only does so until 
the source slips an updated copy of the list to a few peers, and then 
the update spreads. Spam is an economic activity and they won't DoS a 
source if they know it won't help their situation.

    I'm not an expert in DNS, email server configuration, or routing, 
but it seems to me that the whole thing requires a distributed solution 
to harden it against spammers, and that the logical place for this is 
the SMTP daemon itself, possibly coupled with some global registry that 
sells digital certs for a reasonable annual fee, much how domain names 
are handled now (Verisign excluded, of course).


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