On Mon, 5 Jun 2006 20:07:24 -0400, "David Harrington" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi > > The security problems identified in > http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2002-03.html "Multiple > Vulnerabilities in Many Implementations of the Simple Network > Management Protocol (SNMP)" are not caused by the protocol choice to > use ASN.1, but by vendors incorrectly implementing the protocol (which > was made worse by vendors using toolkits that had the problems). > > If "Multiple Vulnerabilities in Implementations" were used to condemn > the encoding methods of protocols that have been incorrectly > implemented, then we would have to condemn an awful lot of IETF > protocols as being very (security) bug prone: > Works for me.... More precisely -- when something is sufficiently complex, it's inherently bug-prone. That is indeed a good reason to push back on a design. The question to ask is whether the *problem* is inherently complex -- when the complexity of the solution significanlty exceeds the inherent complexity of the problem, you've probably made a mistake. When the problem itself is sufficiently complex, it's fair to ask if it should be solved. Remember point (3) of RFC 1925. I'll note that a number of the protocols you cite were indeed criticized *during the design process* as too complex. The objectors were overruled. --Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list [email protected] https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
