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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 --
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