Subject: [Asrg] [draft-irtf-asrg-iar-howe-siq-01] Privacy issues

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Apr 2005 17:06:26 +0200

6. Security Considerations

[...]

   The information passed using either the UDP packet queries or HTTP
   queries, such as the combination of sender's IP, MAIL FROM, and the
   RCPT TO domain may pose some privacy issues. Similar information
   already appears in message trace headers and those headers may have
   already been viewed and logged by intermediate MX servers during
   transit. Taking this perspective, the queries make use of
   information that may have already been revealed else where.

   However, with today's Internet privacy paranoia, a SIQ client MAY
   choose to make HTTP queries over a TLS/SSL connection at the sake
   of the speed and convenience offered by UDP queries or unencrypted
   HTTP queries.

********************

These two paragraphs should be deleted, not only because they
disregard privacy concerns as "paranoia" but also because they miss
the point: the problem is not with a sniffer between the SIQ client
and the SIQ server but with the SIQ server itself.

The SIQ server will learn a lot about the mail use of its
clients. The information you leak to a SIQ server is quite sensitive
and this is what should be mentioned in "Security Considerations".

For instance, one of the reasons many people copy locally DNS RBLs
(with AXFR or rsync or else) is to avoid this problem. (The SIQ
protocol does not seem to provide bulk transfer.)

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