Re: trojans on ftp sites

[PAUL () tdr com (Paul Robinson)]

From: Paul Robinson <PAUL () TDR COM>
Organization: Tansin A. Darcos & Company, Silver Spring, MD USA
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Brent Chapman <brent () greatcircle com>, writes:

> The problem is, how would the Archie servers determine the 
> checksums?  The Archie servers don't download all the files; they 
> merely connect to each FTP server and get a recursive directory 
> listing, which they then massage into their database.  To get the 
> checksums, they'd either have to download every file (very 
> impractical, given the amount of stuff out there), or get the checksum 
> info from the FTP server they're talking to.  There's currently no 
> standard way (hell, there's not even any reasonably COMMON way) to get 
> checksum info from FTP servers. 

Which brings up another question: WHICH checksum do they use?  

Most useful, say, for MSDOS clients would be the CRC-32 checksum which is
used by Zmodem and PKZIP, and a file stored in a Zip archive, if checked
on a file, would match.

On a Unix site, the two-word result from 'sum' would be appropriate and 
most useful.

For other places, MD5 would be better and provides a stronger check than 
CRC-32.  

So which do you use, and how do you know which of these you are getting?
And how do we get a CRC request added to the list of FTP commands, or
the data supplied from them?

---
Paul Robinson - Paul () TDR COM
Voted "Largest Polluter of the (IETF) list" by Randy Bush <randy () psg com>
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