[Asrg] Re: RMX provides auth for one-hop only (Re: privacy is a feature)

["Chris Lewis" <clewis@nortelnetworks.com>]

Adam Back wrote:
> Nodes in the received path can lie with RMX or UUCP, I think this is
> the point.  Ergo RMX only provides authentication when there is one
> hop.
Exactly.  The point-to-point authentication in UUCP provides NO more 
level of authenticity than the peer IP address in a Received line - in 
the one hop you (should be able to) trust - the one into your own machine.

Tracing back a UUCP message to the true origin is exactly the same thing 
as tracing Recieved lines backwards.  Before you can trust the next hop, 
you have to _ask_ the sysadmin to check their logs.  You can frequently 
skip intermediate hops and go to the last one and ask their admin for a 
corresponding record.  But that's the same in UUCP and SMTP.

The only difference is that back in UUCP days, machines tended to be 
multi-user, many orders of magnitude fewer of them, and many orders of 
magnitude less email.

If we were using UUCP technology today (with the necessary scaling 
modifications, such as much higher point-to-point levels, which is 
impractical anyway), we'd have exactly the same problems we're having 
with SMTP in establishing authenticity.

Authenticity has to be end-to-end (eg: signatures) before you can do 
better than SMTP/UUCP can do on their own unless you plan on scaling 
back the Internet by at least 5 orders of magnitude...  I have fond 
recollections of those days (UUCP and Usenet admin since 1982), but we 
don't want to go back there, do we?

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