On Thu, 23 Apr 1998 tqbfat_private wrote: > > > Do not rely on switches because switches are not designed for > > >security. > > > > Based on that logic, there's just about nothing you CAN > > rely on, except death, taxes, and sendmail bugs. > > I don't think that's very fair. It seems obvious to me that some systems > have more attention paid to them for security (VMailer, for instance) than > others (like Sendmail). My confidence in VMailer is much greater than my > confidence in Sendmail, to the point where I'd be willing to consider > deploying VMailer in circumstances where Sendmail's lack of reliability is > prohibitive. Erm, or qmail it would seem ;) > Same goes for switches and link-layer security. I think the comparison is a very good one. In the case of Sendmail, and most network equipment, security is an "add-on" which wasn't central to the original engineering plan. That means that there may be design problems which limit the ammount of security you can really get from the system in question, or things that may have been overlooked while backfilling security. Things like VMailer, which have security as a design point make a very good case for themselves if the implementation is right. I have an obviously high degree of trust in Wietse's ability to do a correct implementation. I use the same type of evaluation criteria for all the products that I have to extend a high degree of trust to. Swich vendors, OS vendors or providers, firewall products, etc. While I can do a fair ammount of verification of some things, I can't check everything. Knowing where you're extending your trust boundries, and to whom is always important. Track record has always been an important metric, and you have to extend trust somewhere, so that combined with due dilligence is the most that a lot of us can hope for. Switch DoS attacks due to spanning-tree implementations and designs which don't take into account the possibility of an attack are out there. While you can gain some measure of protection from some attacks with switches, you open yourself up to others. Not realizing that key pieces of infrastructure weren't necessarily designed correctly could be a farily costly mistake. It doesn't take an attack either, just ask AT&T (Though they have _far_ more to lose from voice over frame, so that may have been a strategicly profitable outage). Paul ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul D. Robertson "My statements in this message are personal opinions probertsat_private which may have no basis whatsoever in fact." PSB#9280
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 12:56:41 PDT