Why is Jabber Spam Free?
A free translation of the text from Peter Saint-Andre, one of the most active participants in the Jabber / XMPP community.
1. In XMPP, the sender's address is not set on the sender's computer in the client program, but on the server. So, the client can not fake the address "From:". (Of course, if you are the administrator of the jabber.org server, in principle, you can send a message on behalf of any user of this server. But only this server. You cannot send a message on behalf of a user of another domain).
2. In XMPP, servers verify each other using a dialback protocol (RFC 3920 / XEP-0220) based on DNS or using server certificates. So, if I run the server on the jabber.org domain, I will not be able to send messages on behalf of microsoft.com or whitehouse.gov. (In addition, messages are delivered from the sender's server to the recipient's server directly, bypassing the intermediate jabber server. There is no one to fake the message addresses in the delivery process.)
3. In principle, the “dialback” protocol is sufficient to prevent anonymous postings on the network. But, so far, there is still optional server authentication using SSL certificates (details on xmpp.net ). If necessary, this authentication can be quite simply made mandatory, it is provided in the protocol.
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4. XMPP is based on pure XML and attackers cannot easily attach malware scripts and viruses to Jabber messages.
In the case of email, spammers actively cooperate with virus writers. Here, the “black programmers” have nothing to do, there is less reason for spam.
5. Most e-mail spam (or spam + malware) targets one specific platform: Outlook + Windows. There is no dominant software platform in the XMPP world.
6. When exchanging IM messages, people are used to keeping contact list - a list of people with whom they want to communicate. For spammers, such a culture is much worse than "I receive emails from anyone in the world." You can always remove a person from your contact list so that he does not bother you or block his messages on the server altogether.
7. All common XMPP servers (server programs) have message frequency limits. This prevents large numbers of messages from one user from being sent in a short period of time.
XMPP is not perfect, you can also send spam in it. But it is much more difficult to do this than in the SMTP network. Moreover, all these difficulties and restrictions for spammers are provided specifically, "by design".
update: Anyone who claims that “you can simply raise your server”: go and pick up, and then try sending spam from it and not burning. ;) Spam is sent anonymously via e-mail: they break other people's servers, build bot nets, search for open relay-i, ... It is quite simple to remain an anonymous client. But in the case of Jabber anonymous server is very difficult to be.
1. In XMPP, the sender's address is not set on the sender's computer in the client program, but on the server. So, the client can not fake the address "From:". (Of course, if you are the administrator of the jabber.org server, in principle, you can send a message on behalf of any user of this server. But only this server. You cannot send a message on behalf of a user of another domain).
2. In XMPP, servers verify each other using a dialback protocol (RFC 3920 / XEP-0220) based on DNS or using server certificates. So, if I run the server on the jabber.org domain, I will not be able to send messages on behalf of microsoft.com or whitehouse.gov. (In addition, messages are delivered from the sender's server to the recipient's server directly, bypassing the intermediate jabber server. There is no one to fake the message addresses in the delivery process.)
3. In principle, the “dialback” protocol is sufficient to prevent anonymous postings on the network. But, so far, there is still optional server authentication using SSL certificates (details on xmpp.net ). If necessary, this authentication can be quite simply made mandatory, it is provided in the protocol.
')
4. XMPP is based on pure XML and attackers cannot easily attach malware scripts and viruses to Jabber messages.
In the case of email, spammers actively cooperate with virus writers. Here, the “black programmers” have nothing to do, there is less reason for spam.
5. Most e-mail spam (or spam + malware) targets one specific platform: Outlook + Windows. There is no dominant software platform in the XMPP world.
6. When exchanging IM messages, people are used to keeping contact list - a list of people with whom they want to communicate. For spammers, such a culture is much worse than "I receive emails from anyone in the world." You can always remove a person from your contact list so that he does not bother you or block his messages on the server altogether.
7. All common XMPP servers (server programs) have message frequency limits. This prevents large numbers of messages from one user from being sent in a short period of time.
XMPP is not perfect, you can also send spam in it. But it is much more difficult to do this than in the SMTP network. Moreover, all these difficulties and restrictions for spammers are provided specifically, "by design".
update: Anyone who claims that “you can simply raise your server”: go and pick up, and then try sending spam from it and not burning. ;) Spam is sent anonymously via e-mail: they break other people's servers, build bot nets, search for open relay-i, ... It is quite simple to remain an anonymous client. But in the case of Jabber anonymous server is very difficult to be.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/40592/
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