BSDstats Project v2.0 ...

[Jonathan Horne]

On Friday 11 August 2006 22:29, Nikolas Britton wrote:
> On 8/11/06, Matthew Seaman <m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk> wrote:
> > Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> > > On Fri, 11 Aug 2006, Nikolas Britton wrote:
> > >> Ok... With my new script it took only 158 minutes to compute ALL
> > >> TCP/IP address hashes. I'll repeat that... I have an md5 hash for
> > >> every IP address in the world! All I need to do is grep your hash and
> > >> it will tell me your IP address. yippee! :-)
> > >
> > > Can someone please explain to me what exactly you are trying to secure
> > > against in this case?
> >
> > He's trying to prevent any possibility of information disclosure about
> > his servers.  If I wanted to hack into his site, knowing what hosts he
> > had running (ie. a bunch of live IP numbers) and what OS etc. each used
> > would mean I'm already halfway to my goal.  Now, while the design of
> > bsdstats does not disclose that sort of stuff readily, any security
> > conscious admin is going to worry about that data being collected and
> > held outside of his administrative control.  Having a completely
> > anonymous and untraceable token to identify each of the hosts sending
> > in information should make connecting the information back to the
> > original sender practically impossible.
>
> YES! what he said... I don't want ANYTHING to trace back to me or my
> systems.
>
> > Although, playing devil's advocate here, anyone that could steal the
> > Apache log files from the bsdstats server would be able to work out
> > that sort of data fairly readily.  I guess the truly paranoid should
> > only submit their data via some sort of anonymizing proxy.
>
> That's simple, don't keep the log files...
>
> * Can we trust Marc to delete them?
> * I thought this was going to be an official FreeBSD project hosted on
>  freebsd.org?
> * Maybe we should get the OpenBSD people involved?
>
> Just thinking out loud :-/

honestly, should said security concious admins, really be participating 'using 
his bosses servers' in this project?  probably not.  even if all the security 
consious admins out there decline to have all their datacenters participate 
in bsdstats, im sure just the ones who decide that the risk of sending the 
same info your browser does (plus a bit more if you choose and deliberatly 
enable) is appropriate for them, is still going to give one hell of a great 
demographic report to bsdstats.

2 cents,
jonathan