On Oct 7, 2006, at 10:42 AM, Lakshminath Dondeti wrote:
At 01:42 AM 10/7/2006, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
<snip>
Many universities require their students to buy their own laptops,
but prohibit certain types of activity from those laptops (like
spamming, DDOS-attacks and the like). They would love to have the
ability to run some kind of NEA procedure to ensure that laptops
are reasonably virus-free and free from known vulnerabilities, and
are important enough in their students' lives that they can
probably enforce it without a complaint about "violation of privacy".
Just pointing out that there's one use case with user-managed
endpoints where NEA is not obviously a bad idea.
My email ventures into a bit of non-IETF territory, but we are
discussing use cases, and so I guess it's on topic. Universities
should be the last places to try antics like NEA. Whereas an
operational network would be a priority to them, it is also
important that they allow students to experiment with new
applications. If we are believing that general purpose computing
will be taken away from college students, we are indeed talking
about a different world.
In any event, the bottomline is NEA as a solution to "network
protection" is a leaky bucket at best.
NEA at best *may* raise the bar in attacking a "closed" network
where endpoints are owned and tightly controlled by the
organization that owns the network.
Services are currently offered that detect abnormal traffic, where
users are directed to scrubbing services suitable for ISPs or
universities. This is done through walled garden techniques. Once
remediation is completed, restrictions are removed. This does not
depend upon specific conformance standardization, but rather
specialized utilities loaded with a browser where restrictions are
also applied. When the system in question is not using a browser,
other methods of notification of a need for remediation are needed.
A standardize signaling of asserted conformance and a need for
remediation might be where this effort is best focused.
-Doug
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