Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: Re: Stanford Tracking Racist E-Mails
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Fri, 04 Jun 1999 07:42:09 -0400
Date: Thu, 03 Jun 1999 23:51:14 -0700 From: Jeff Hodges <Jeff.Hodges () Stanford edu> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (WinNT; U) X-Accept-Language: en To: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu> CC: Jeff Hodges <Jeff.Hodges () Stanford edu> Subject: Re: Stanford Tracking Racist E-Mails A good article about the incident is here.. http://daily.stanford.org/Daily98-99/6-2-1999/news/NEWe-mail02.html ..and another is here.. http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/june2/email-62.html This is seemingly an instance of a "masquerade attack" wherein the intended victim is the person who's account the email message apparently originated from, and everyone who received the unsavory (in this case) message are secondary victims. This isn't the only masquerade attack we've had, according to our security officer, but it's the most visible (that I can recall). I won't be surprised to see this sort of attack become more pervasive as more people figure out how easy it is to forge "plain" email messages. Of course, strong-crypto-based integrity and attribution assurances will help mitigate this, but we need the tools and infrastructure to support that to be pervasive. And that isn't going to happen soon given the government's current stance toward crypto. Jeff http://www.stanford.edu/~hodges/
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- IP: Re: Stanford Tracking Racist E-Mails Dave Farber (Jun 04)