Re: Countering Botnets to Reduce Spam

On 12-12-14 08:17 PM, John Levine wrote:

> Other than the magic term P2P, what does this provide above what
> packages like Tripwire do now?  Any particular distribution of Linux
> is installed from a known set of masters, where the files have known
> checksums.  The checksums are not large, and are not a big deal to
> retrieve.  What does P2P add?  Random other Linux boxes are certainly
> not more likely to have a set of good checksums than, say, an https
> server run by a well known distribution organization.

I _suppose_ it might make it a bit more feasible to obtain checksums of
random code that isn't necessarily in sync with a Linux dist.

In many hosting environments, there can be literally as many versions
of, say, Wordpress, as there are customers.  The admins steadily patch
the basic O/S, but often they won't touch the customer's images for fear
of breaking them.

Or virtualized systems.  Just imagine how many different O/S images
there are on a cloud.  Eg: Amazon expects the customer to do their _own_
patching.

I really don't think the idea would work in the end of the industry
(cloud, multi-host platforms) that need it most.