Even you can be hacked

Fri Jun 11 22:56:53 UTC 2004

--On 11 June 2004 14:18 -0700 Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:

> the bottom line
>
>   o if you want the internet to continue to innovate, then
>     the end-to-end model is critical.  it means that it

If there is a lesson here, seems to me it's that those innovative protocols
should be designed such that it is relatively easy to prevent or at least
discourage "bad traffic". Because that's in the long run easier (read
cheaper for those of you of a free market bent) than educating users in an
ever changing environment. It would be a bit rich to criticize SMTP
(for instance) as misdesigned for not bearing this in mind given
the difficulty of anticipating its success at the time, but there is a
lesson here for other protocols. I can think of one rather obvious one
which would seem to allow delivery of junk in many similar ways to SMTP;
hadn't thought of this before but we should be learning from our
mistakes^Wprevious valuable experience.

Alex