Re: NATs as firewalls and the NEA

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 




On Mar 5, 2007, at 5:51 PM, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:

Quite, the technical part of my proposal is essentially a generalization of the emergent principle of port 25 blocking. While people were doing this before SUBMIT was proposed the SUBMIT proposal made it possible to do so without negative impact on legitimate users.

How do we establish the political coalition necessary to act? There is clearly additional discussion necessary within the IETF community to achieve a measure of consensus. I agree that the IETF list is not the place for that.

We need more than just consensus in the IETF though. We need to convince the ISPs to act who in turn must persuade the vendors of SOHO routers. The ISPs have leverage, they write RFPs. The ISPs and others discuss this type of issue in forums such as MAAWG. The institutional issue is how to present an IETF consensus to such fora.

This need does not seem to be anticipated in the IETF constitution. The body with the closest mandate would appear to be the IAB.

While outbound controls in low cost SOHO routers, NATs, DSL or cable modems could prove useful, there is a significant hardware installation base that will not be replaced anytime soon. Unless ISPs are willing to invest in a centralized means of control within their networks and then endure the resulting support, the problem will persist. Such an investment is likely to be seen as in conflict with maximizing revenues.

Guidelines for ISP best practices might include a recommendation for access device features, however it seems unlikely anything that requires additional support, especially those that instruct users to disable some feature, as being a lost cause. It seems unlikely any ISP will wish to embrace this effort, regardless of need.

The scope for the NEA effort could have been broader. The NEA control mechanism is lacking, and this effort will not consider compatibility with the Internet as a whole. This seems like a missed opportunity for improving protections where ISPs could also stand to benefit.

-Doug

_______________________________________________

Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

[Index of Archives]     [IETF Annoucements]     [IETF]     [IP Storage]     [Yosemite News]     [Linux SCTP]     [Linux Newbies]     [Fedora Users]