Schneier: ISPs should bear security burden

Iljitsch van Beijnum iljitsch at muada.com
Thu Apr 28 07:17:42 UTC 2005


On 27-apr-2005, at 20:08, Dan Hollis wrote:

> I can definitely say
> worms, trojans, spam, phishing, ddos, and other attacks is up several
> orders of magnitude in those 20 years. Malicious packets now  
> account for
> a significant percentage of all ip traffic. Eventually I expect  
> malicious
> packets will outnumber legitimate packets, just like malicious email
> outnumbers legitimate email today.

> As long as the environmental polluter model continues to be  
> championed and
> promoted on nanog (of all places), the problem will only get worse.

The problem is that the maliciousness of packets or email is largely  
in the eye of the beholder. How do you propose ISPs determine which  
packets the receiver wants to receive, and which they don't want to  
receive? (At Mpps rates, of course.)

This whole discussion is a clear example of the fallacy of treating  
"security" as an independent entity, rather than an aspect of other  
things.

There are many ISPs that do less than they should, though. (Allow  
spoofed sources, don't do anything against hosts that are reported to  
send clearly abusive traffic, sometimes even at DoS rates...)




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