Subject: Fwd: Indianz.com NEWS BRIEFS: APRIL 1, 2001

From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 20:09:32 -0400

Not having seen an RFC come over the transom yesterday or today, here is an
alternative.

http://216.218.205.86/april1.asp

Enjoy,
Eric

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From: "Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 09:15:56 +0700

> Not having seen an RFC come over the transom yesterday or today, 
> here is an alternative.

Are you sure?

1 April Special
* RFC 3091 on Pi Digit Generation Protocol
* RFC 3092 on Etymology of "Foo"
* RFC 3093 on Firewall Enhancement Protocol

-----------------------------------------------------------
* RFC 3091 on Pi Digit Generation Protocol
  http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3091.html

  This protocol is intended to provide the Pi digit generation service
  (PIgen), and be used between clients and servers on host computers.
  Typically the clients are on workstation hosts lacking local Pi
  support, and the servers are more capable machines with greater Pi
  calculation capabilities.  The essential tradeoff is the use of
  network resources and time instead of local computational cycles.

* RFC 3092 on Etymology of "Foo"
  http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3092.html

  Approximately 212 RFCs so far, starting with RFC 269, contain the
  terms `foo', `bar', or `foobar' as metasyntactic variables without
  any proper explanation or definition.  This document rectifies that
  deficiency.

* RFC 3093 on Firewall Enhancement Protocol
  http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3093.html

  Internet Transparency via the end-to-end architecture of the Internet
  has allowed vast innovation of new technologies and services [1].
  However, recent developments in Firewall technology have altered this 
  model and have been shown to inhibit innovation.  We propose the
  Firewall Enhancement Protocol (FEP) to allow innovation, without
  violating the security model of a Firewall.  With no cooperation from
  a firewall operator, the FEP allows ANY application to traverse a
  Firewall.  Our methodology is to layer any application layer
  Transmission Control Protocol/User Datagram Protocol (TCP/UDP) packets
  over the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) protocol, since HTTP
  packets are typically able to transit Firewalls.  This scheme does not 
  violate the actual security usefulness of a Firewall, since Firewalls
  are designed to thwart attacks from the outside and to ignore threats
  from within.  The use of FEP is compatible with the current Firewall
  security model because it requires cooperation from a host inside the
  Firewall.  FEP allows the best of both worlds: the security of a
  firewall, and transparent tunneling thought the firewall.

regards,

-- 
Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim - VLSM-TJT - http://rms46.vlsm.org
--- The Kappa likes getting cucumber --- Budum... Budum...

---

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 11:53:21 +0100 (BST)

> * RFC 3091 on Pi Digit Generation Protocol

Jon Postel would have made that RFC3141...

L.

<[email-masked]>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>

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From: Theodore Tso <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 14:17:45 -0400

On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 09:15:56AM +0700, Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim wrote:
>   packets are typically able to transit Firewalls.  

I was disappointed in this RFC, since it doesn't actually work;
typically the user who is trapped on the inside of the firewall only
can initial HTTP connections, and so you have to play some polling
games (and ideally encapsulate multiple packets as part of the HTTP
GET response for efficiency's sake) in order to process packets from
the outside of the firewall making it back into inside-firewall user.

Of course, in order to be practical you'd also want to add some
encryption plus some varying steganography so that you can evade
firewall vendors trying to detect and prevent such http tunnelling
requests.

I had talked about this with a few folks a year or two ago as a
possible April 1st RFC, but we had wanted to back it up with real,
live running code which demonstrated something which could actually
work.....  ah, well, so many interesting projects, so little time....

						- Ted