Venema on Spam

I'm grateful for physicist Wietse Venema's contributions (satan, the coroner's toolkit, TCP Wrappers, and Postfix) to the computer security world, but I certainly Venema's anti-spam solution never gets implemented:

The best theoretic solution is to change the email distribution model, but this may never happen. Right now, email is a "push" technology where the sender has most of the control, and where the receiver bears most of the cost.

The alternative is to use a "pull" model, where the sender keeps the email message on their own server until the receiver downloads it. For example, when my bank wants to send me email, they would send a short message with an URL to view their mail, and my email software would download the message for me. This assumes of course that my email software recognizes my bank's email digital signature and their Web site's SSL certificate, otherwise we would have a phishing problem. Legacy mail software would tell the user that they have email at their bank, and leave it up to the user to download their email.

The "pull" model would change the economics of email. It would move the bulk of the cost from the receivers where it is now, to the senders where it belongs. No-one would read email if its sender doesn't provide a service where recipients can download it from.

Except that his proposed "pull" model would change the incentives in such a way that email uers' would not opt-in. Blackberries and the like use a "push" model today so that busy execs (or wannabe middle managers) can read email while in the tube trains without connectivity. Gmail wants to have that message pulled down and indexed, ready for searching (a different set of security issues). Not to mention that the users will now have to make decisions about whether or not to "pull" email based on just the meta information, not full content inspection (e.g. sender's address and subject line). What happens when my friend is hijacked and has his outgoing mailbox full of spam or viruses destined for me? I would have to tell without the details. Often, I cannot tell whether something is worth reading without skimming the body of the message. It could be my bank telling me my statement is available or that they want to offer me yet another home equity loan (the former is interesting; the latter is junk). It's just not going to work.

I'm all in favor of changing economics of the situation. I just don't think this has it.

Computer Security is Harder than Nuclear Physics

It's official. We now have conclusive evidence. Computer Security is, in fact, more difficult than nuclear physics. I submit to you, exhibit A:

As the first particles were circulating in the machine near Geneva where the world wide web was born, a Greek group hacked into the facility, posting a warning about weaknesses in its infrastructure.

Calling themselves the Greek Security Team, the interlopers mocked the IT used on the project, describing the technicians responsible for security as "a bunch of schoolkids."

However, despite an ominous warning "don't mess with us," the hackers said they had no intention of disrupting the work of the atom smasher.

"We're pulling your pants down because we don't want to see you running around naked looking to hide yourselves when the panic comes," they wrote in Greek in a rambling note posted on the LHC's network.

The scientists behind the £4.4 billion "Big Bang" machine had already received threatening emails and been besieged by telephone calls from worried members of the public concerned by speculation that the machine could trigger a black hole to swallow the earth, or earthquakes and tsunamis, despite endless reassurances to the contrary from the likes of Prof Stephen Hawking.

The website - www.cmsmon.cern.ch - can no longer be accessed by the public as a result of the attack.

Scientists working at Cern, the organisation that runs the vast smasher, were worried about what the hackers could do because they were "one step away" from the computer control system of one of the huge detectors of the machine, a vast magnet that weighs 12500 tons, measuring around 21 metres in length and 15 metres wide/high.

If they had hacked into a second computer network, they could have turned off parts of the vast detector and, said the insider, "it is hard enough to make these things work if no one is messing with it."

Fortunately, only one file was damaged but one of the scientists firing off emails as the CMS team fought off the hackers said it was a "scary experience".

The hackers targeted the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment, or CMS, one of the four "eyes" of the facility that will be analysing the fallout of the Big Bang.

The CMS team of around 2000 scientists is racing with another team that runs the Atlas detector, also at Cern, to find the Higgs particle, one that is responsible for mass.

"There seems to be no harm done. From what they can tell, it was someone making the point that CMS was hackable," said James Gillies, spokesman for Cern. "It was quickly detected."

In all seriousness, computer security is a difficult problem. Very difficult. So difficult, that it is usually not even properly defined. In this HUGE scientific experiment, with $Billions spent to achieve success to the point where they currently are, not to mention the world's brightest scientists (and no doubt a tip-top IT staff to support them) there still was at least one vulnerability that threatened total loss of control of all of their IT systems (including the ones controlling the new controversial device).