Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site hou3c.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!hou3c!MRC@SU-SCORE.ARPA From: MRC@SU-SCORE.ARPA (Mark Crispin) Newsgroups: net.mail.headers Subject: SMTP and authentication Message-ID: <383@hou3c.UUCP> Date: Tue, 6-Mar-84 16:57:15 EST Article-I.D.: hou3c.383 Posted: Tue Mar 6 16:57:15 1984 Date-Received: Wed, 7-Mar-84 06:44:17 EST Sender: ka@hou3c.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist) Lines: 34 To: Header-People@MIT-MC.ARPA Postal-Address: 725 Mariposa Ave. #103; Mountain View, CA 94041 Phone: (415) 497-1407 (Stanford); (415) 968-1052 (residence) As a taxpaying citizen of the United States of America (and reasonably patriotic, despite certain leftist political views), I strongly object to the idea of having Internet mail used for ANY confidential, official, or any other traffic which in some way involves USA national security. Internet mail is, and should remain, a high-connectivity, high-throughput mail network with reasonable reliability and validation. This is quite suited for the research purposes it is mostly put to. Excessive validation (which tends to affect the HELO command and not the return-path in the MAIL FROM command) will only serve to seriously impact the high connectivity of Internet mail. I am glad to hear the military follows up all official (and unclassified, I hope!) directives sent over Internet with a TWX. My faith in the US military as a viable agency in defending our nation against foreign aggression would be shattered if it relied on Internet mail. What makes this whole discussion silly is that NONE of the hosts on Internet (except perhaps the Multics sites) are secure enough to have authenticated mail in any case. Certainly not any of the Tenex, TOPS-20, or Unix systems. It is only when you can restrict entry into the network (e.g. the secure subnet of Milnet) that there is any authentication at all. Even then all it means is that the mail was not forged outside of the network. Can't we end this once and for all? Authentication does not exist, and cannot exist with the current hosts on the network. -- Mark -- -------