🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BIANCO.92Aug13092256@aelle.cs.odu.edu> bianco@aelle.cs.odu.edu (Dave) writes:
>In article <1992Aug13.121416.7078@csd.uch.gr> kanagn@athina.cc.uch.gr (Kostas Anagnostakis) writes:
>
>     I had an idea I would like to share with you. Why not implement SMTP
>     allowing only connections from PRIVILEGED ports. As far as I have gone
>     into the matter, this would be a solution because a normal user is
>     not able to use a socket port < 1000 so his attempt to connect to
>     a SMTP server will fail.
>
>Well, pretty much anyone nowdays can become "root" by buying
>their own machine.  It all boils down to the question of "Can
>you trust the remote machine to tell you the correct mail header?"
>You can't...

The ONLY possible benefit I could see to this idea would that it would stop
the forging of mail by telnetting to the SMTP port.  While people with root
access or Macs and PCs connected to the network could get around this, it does
take a bit more knowledge than simply telnetting to port 25 and forging mail
headers does.  This would at least slightly raise the difficulty factor for
wanna-bes on the Internet.

I can hardly see it being worth replacing all the software out there to
implement this, though.

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Hi, I'm a .signature worm.  I've already copied myself into your .signature.