[PLUG] Secret message web page

Eric Wilhelm scratchcomputing at gmail.com
Sat Apr 14 21:39:18 UTC 2007


I'll second the issues of the self-signed cert.  You really do need the 
"I am who I say I am" bit for this whole thing to work.  (Whatever 
happened to the freegeek semi-monthly keysigning anyway?)

# from Jason Martin
# on Saturday 14 April 2007 12:16 pm:

>If the interface is open it could be subject to spam.

My thoughts exactly.  Anything resembling a POSTable form anywhere on 
your website will be immediately pelted by bots (as soon as they find 
it) looking for naive e-mail scripts that don't protect the header from 
being appended by the form content.  If you're not careful, the page 
could even be sending spam to *elsewhere* without you knowing it 
(unless you're watching the server log.)

You want to be sure you don't have *that* sort of cgi script.

>Also, I assume you have considered the fact that *you* have no way of
>verifying the identity of the sender? 

You probably also want to make it a password-protected page.  Hand-out a 
one-time password to your visitor over the phone (or e-mail if you 
must, since the risk is greatly reduced by the expiry window.)

>On 4/14/07, Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:
>> ... cgibin/XXXXXXXXX.cgi

If you *really* wanted it tested, you would post the real url here where 
the scambots could find it :-D

--Eric
-- 
"Because understanding simplicity is complicated."
--Eric Raymond
---------------------------------------------------
    http://scratchcomputing.com
---------------------------------------------------



More information about the PLUG mailing list