RE: LoA (Letter of Authorization) for Prefix Filter Modification?
It is only a good audit trail if the audit log can be trusted, though. Given how "secure" things like faxes are, well, that's a thing for another day, I suppose. Very few things out there in today's interconnected world really provide "hard" security, instead of security theatre/CYA/minor deterrants/"keeping honest people honest". That is not to say that these things have zero inherent value, at least in my mind, but they are not IMO to be confused with high security (as in military grade versus making a few clever [socially engineered] phone calls). Even so, much of the modern day business world relies on these things to some degree or another. - S -----Original Message----- From: Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net> Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2008 11:15 To: Jon Lewis <jlewis@lewis.org> Cc: Rodriguez Mauricio <Mauricio.Rodriguez@fpl.com>; nanog@nanog.org <nanog@nanog.org> Subject: Re: LoA (Letter of Authorization) for Prefix Filter Modification?
On Tue, 16 Sep 2008, Christian Koch wrote:
I dont mind, i think it is another good step towards 'good filtering' but...i think the PITA part is downstream 'clueless' customers, who may need an explanation on prefix hijacking and the state of the internet today, and that these are all just combined efforts to minimize the risk of accepting allocations that don't belong to you.
IMO, it's just an illusion of added security and is really just CYA for the provider. When I fax TWTelecom an LOA that a customer faxed to me, how does TWTelecom verify the authenticity of that LOA? I doubt they try. I suspect it's just filed, and will only be pulled out if the advertisement is challenged by some 3rd party.
How do you verify the authenticity of anything? This is a common problem in the Real World, and is hardly limited to LoA's. How do you prove that what was on Pages 1 to (N-1) of an N page contract contained the words you think they said? I knew a guy, back in the early days, who habitually changed the SLA's in his contracts so that he could cancel a contract for virtually no reason at all ... the folly of mailing around contracts as .doc files in e-mail. But even failing that, it's pretty trivial to reprint a document, so where do you stop, do you use special paper, special ink, watermarking of documents, initial each page, all of the above, etc? Look at what people are willing to go through with paper checks to increase the chances of authenticity. Google Abagnale. The real world already has ways of dealing with fraud and forgery, and while the paper is certainly CYA for the provider, it does provide an actual trail back that can probably be followed to some party. To refer to it as an "illusion" is only vaguely true. It is an illusion in that it will not prevent all cases of hijacking. Of course. However, it is another step that makes it significantly more difficult for someone to just start announcing random bits of IP space. It's just like physical security, in many ways. Given a sufficiently determined attacker, any door can be broken. Wood door? May require only my boot. Steel door? Prybar. Bank vault? Explosives. Etc. The thing is, as you increase the level of protection, the ease of countermeasures typically decreases (I wear my boots almost 100% of the time, I may have a prybar nearby, but I am unlikely to be carrying explosives at any time.) So let's not trivialize improvements such as LoA's which reduce the ease of hijackings, eh. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
It is only a good audit trail if the audit log can be trusted, though. Given how "secure" things like faxes are, well, that's a thing for another day, I suppose.
Very few things out there in today's interconnected world really provide "hard" security, instead of security theatre/CYA/minor deterrants/"keeping honest people honest".
That is not to say that these things have zero inherent value, at least in my mind, but they are not IMO to be confused with high security (as in military grade versus making a few clever [socially engineered] phone calls).
Even so, much of the modern day business world relies on these things to some degree or another.
As I said, there are already ways to deal with these issues. Unfortunately, most of them are reactive in nature. Despite that fact, I would much prefer to see a LoA, which will have some significant deterrent value, rather than nothing at all. The "security" of faxes has very little to do with it. If twtelecom finds that Jon Lewis over at Atlantic.net is sending in LoA's that turn out to be fraudulent, it is very likely that the level of scrutiny for future LoA's will suddenly increase, maybe involving calls to ARIN, the contact information for the organization in question, etc., to try to further determine the authenticity. On the flip side, if Jon has sent in a hundred LoA's, and none have ever been questioned, the level of scrutiny is likely to be reasonably low. Risk assessment in this environment isn't *that* rough, and worrying about whether or not the trail can be audited/ authenticated, security of faxes, etc., may be excessively paranoid. We do not have an Internet that is designed with "hard" security in mind, so worrying about the easily attacked portions is certainly worthwhile, but let's be thoughtful, rather than obsessive, about it. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
participants (2)
-
Joe Greco -
Skywing