On Wed, 13 Aug 2003, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
In message <Pine.GSO.4.53.0308131452310.19594@rampart.argfrp.us.uu.net>, "Chris topher L. Morrow" writes:
This is the point, atleast I, have been trying to make for 2 years... end systems, or as close to that as possible, need to police themselves, the granularity and filtering capabilities (content filtering even) are available at that level alone.
It's just not possible.
Believe it or not, I don't much like firewalls. But see slide 5 of a talk I gave in May, 1994 (http://www.research.att.com/~smb/talks/firewalls.ps or http://www.research.att.com/~smb/talks/firewalls.pdf) for why we need them. We'll *always* have buggy code.
... long message trimmed .... I'm not entirely sure where you have shown that 'filtering as close to the end system as possible' is not possible. You mention that in extreme circumstances ISP's might have to step in to save the network from itself, which I agreed much earlier was the case. You did not, however, show that end systems and their local admin gruops can't police their own networks and help to make these problems much more difficult and noisy.