On Mon, Mar 15, 2004 at 04:13:44PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote: > Wouter Verhelst wrote: > > On Mon, Mar 15, 2004 at 03:44:00PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote: > > > Wouter Verhelst wrote: > > > > So, you would like to see our mailservers DoSed because they need to > > > > throw CPU power at anything that vaguely resembles a PGP signature? > > > > > > All SMTP servers are an easy DoS target because of the large command > > > timeouts. > > > > That's a reason to make the situation worse? > > I just wanted to put things into perspective. If there's a real benefit > if signatures are verified and it's implementable with the available > resources, then go for it. I don't think the DoS risk is a showstopper. I think it is. It's trivial to create a mail message that vaguely looks like a PGP-signed message, and send out spam that way. There's no way to check whether a message has a valid PGP signature except for running gpg or pgp, which is much more CPU-intensive than adding a random text that has the look of a PGP signature. Implementing this is equal to creating a *very* easy DoS attack vector. -- Wouter Verhelst Debian GNU/Linux -- http://www.debian.org Nederlandstalige Linux-documentatie -- http://nl.linux.org "Stop breathing down my neck." "My breathing is merely a simulation." "So is my neck, stop it anyway!" -- Voyager's EMH versus the Prometheus' EMH, stardate 51462.
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