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 278 <font size="-1">October 2, 1998</font>
 279 <br>
 280 <b><font size="+1">Venema aims to make network software safe</font></b>
 281 </p><p>
 282 <i>by Cameron Laird</i>
 283
 284 </p><p>
 285 <font size="-1">"It's a lot more work than I expected." -- <i>Wietse Venema</i></font>
 286
 287 </p><p>E-mail is so mature an Internet application that it now
 288 almost doesn't seem like "technology"; it's just an expectation
 289 of late Twentieth Century life, like clean water or falling
 290 gasoline prices.  It hasn't become <i>easy</i> yet, though, for
 291 people like IBM research staff member Wietse Venema, who's
 292 in the middle of a project "to build a mail system that does
 293 not screw up your machine," called VMailer.
 294
 295 </p><p>
 296 <img src="developer.199810_files/wietse.gif" width="131" height="131" border="1" align="left">
 297 Venema's a good man for the job.  He's worked for over a
 298   decade on a broad range of "software whose existence you
 299   don't notice because it works well": network security,
 300   inter-company financial transactions, terminal emulation,
 301   and so on.  "My software rarely fails ...  My claim to fame
 302   is largely based on the low incidence of error" in the
 303   infrastructural applications he's written.  Now he's moved
 304   permanently to the "beautiful landscape" of central New York
 305   state from his native Netherlands to dedicate a year to VMailer.
 306 </p><p>
 307 </p><h4>How e-mail moves</h4>
 308
 309 When you send a letter through e-mail to someone down the
 310 street or on the other side of the globe, dozens of distinct
 311 operations are typically involved:  "Electronic mail is one of
 312 the most complex applications.  It's a network server, because it
 313 receives mail from the network; it's a network client, because it
 314 delivers mail through the network; it's a queue management system,
 315 because sometimes mail can't be delivered right away; it's a database
 316 management system, because it must deal with multi-user access to
 317 the mailbox store. And of course, it has to be safe, fast and secure,
 318 and easy to administer."
 319
 320 <p>When things work right, you aren't aware of all these complexities.
 321 You see only the so-called "user agent" on your own machine, that
 322 manages communications with all the other pieces.  You might have
 323 heard, though, of one of the most widely used of these other pieces:
 324 sendmail.  It is an open-source application originally written
 325 by Eric Allman in 1980 while a student.  sendmail is the "transfer
 326 agent" in use on the overwhelming majority of Internet servers; its
 327 job is to pass letters along from one machine to another, until
 328 they arrive at their final destination.
 329
 330 </p><p>sendmail is a resounding success; it has delivered trillions of
 331 messages in the last two decades, and the Sendmail Consortium
 332 and Sendmail, Inc. co-operate well to maintain and enhance it.
 333 It's also notoriously complex and subject to cracking.  That's
 334 where Venema comes in.
 335
 336
 337 </p><h4>The VMailer alternative</h4>
 338
 339 VMailer is Venema's alternative to sendmail.  "VMailer attempts
 340 to be fast, easy to administer, and hopefully secure, while at
 341 the same time being sendmail compatible enough to not upset your
 342 users."  Venema's aim is that Internet servers will soon begin
 343 to switch over from sendmail to VMailer.  End-users shouldn't notice
 344 this when it happens, apart from small improvements in reliability and
 345 speed of delivery.
 346
 347 <p>It'll be a big change for system administrators, though.  Sendmail
 348 is written as a monolithic program, with an exceedingly terse
 349 configuration language (<code>"R$* &lt;@$+.uucp&gt; $*      $: $1 &lt;@ $(U $2.uucp $) &gt;$3"</code>
 350 is typical).  VMailer is a collection of small, relatively simple,
 351 secure, swift programs, which work together to do the job sendmail
 352 now does.  "The reason for making VMailer distributed was to get
 353 better insulation between different parts of the system. ...
 354 Monolithic programs have poor damage control.  ...  As with
 355 Titanic, a compartmentalized architecture does not make the system
 356 immune against disaster, but it won't fail as easily as a system
 357 that isn't compartmentalized."
 358
 359 </p><p>The VMailer "teammates" are fast.  "With a [US] $3,000 desktop PC,
 360 VMailer can receive and deliver a million different messages per day."
 361 They're safe -- they respond intelligently when loaded heavily or
 362 attacked.  And they're compatible with existing work; Venema has
 363 designed VMailer so it can replace a working sendmail installation
 364 without wasted motion.
 365
 366 </p><p>The price for VMailer is also right.  To encourage the widest
 367 possible dissemination, Venema doesn't charge for VMailer.  IBM
 368 Research has supported him in this, he says, because the attitude
 369 it has communicated to him is, "if you don't give it away, you
 370 might as well throw it away."
 371
 372
 373 </p><h4>VMailer's prospects</h4>
 374
 375 So when will you begin to use VMailer?  If you've traded letters
 376 with Venema this year, or are on one of the specialty mailing lists
 377 he manages, you already have:  "In December 1997 I turned off
 378 sendmail, forever, on all my machines."  VMailer handles everything
 379 to and from porcupine.org (the name is an insider joke:  "Europe is
 380 a collection of countries each with their own regulations.  Making
 381 progress in Europe reminds me of porcupines making love.  Auch!
 382 Sorry! Look out!").  Alpha tests with a small group of trusted
 383 colleagues began a month later.  Beta release will be public, and
 384 he hopes it'll be in just a few weeks, during November 1998.
 385
 386 <p>Understand that Venema uses those words differently from
 387 several commercial vendors.  Public beta for VMailer means
 388 "people expect that my programs solve more problems than they
 389 cause.  [It's] something close to perfection.  ...  I am
 390 preparing an incomplete system for release [to experimentally
 391 determine people's needs].  That's why I call it a beta. It has
 392 nothing to do with software quality."
 393
 394
 395 </p><h4>Life after and before VMailer</h4>
 396
 397 Once VMailer meets Venema's goals, he'll turn it over to a
 398   maintenance group and move on to other work.  "My next project
 399   is porting tcp wrappers to IP version 6, the next generation of
 400   Internet protocols; vendors have gotten ahead of me already,
 401   which is an embarassment for me."
 402
 403 <p>Before VMailer, Venema was probably best known for his work
 404 with the Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks
 405 (SATAN).  SATAN probes machines connected to the Net and
 406 reports on problems or weaknesses it finds.  This is a great
 407 convenience for system administrators responsible for securing
 408 these machines; it gives them a nicely formatted, thorough
 409 explanation of the deficiencies they need to address.  As with
 410 all the tools Venema writes, "I have given away the programs ...
 411 so that other people can inspect and use them, too."
 412
 413 </p><p>SATAN has attracted a bit of controversy during its life.
 414 A few commentators mislabeled it as a tool for breaking into
 415 sites.  In any case, "[m]ost people know me from my software
 416 to protect systems against Internet intruders."  That kind of
 417 high profile attracts crackers, who treat break-ins to
 418 prominent sites as a competitive sport.  In the case of Venema's
 419 domain, though, the most accomplished and dangerous intruders
 420 "know that for many years, my Internet gateway has been logging
 421 every network packet to disk. It's good insurance."
 422
 423 </p><p>Away from the keyboard, Venema and his wife Annita are looking
 424 forward to replacing the bicycles they sold when they moved.  This
 425 will give them a chance to explore the North Country Trailway, which
 426 runs near their new home.  "This is continent collision zone, with
 427 lots of weird geology. It's quite a change from the Netherlands,
 428 which is all flat and which has almost no trees."
 429
 430 </p><h4>Links on this story</h4>
 431 <ul>
 432 <li><a href="http://www.research.ibm.com/home.html" target="resource window">IBM Research</a>
 433 </li><li><a href="http://www.porcupine.org/wietse/" target="resource window">Wietse Venema's home page</a>
 434 </li><li><a href="http://www.porcupine.org/vmailer/" target="resource window"> Venema's VMailer Project</a>
 435 </li><li><a href="http://www.sendmail.org/" target="resource window">Sendmail Consortium</a>
 436 </li><li><a href="http://www.sendmail.com/" target="resource window">Sendmail, Inc.</a>
 437 </li><li><a href="ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/security/tcp_wrappers_7.6.BLURB" target="resource window">tcp wrappers BLURB</a>
 438 </li><li><a href="http://www.porcupine.org/satan/" target="resource window">SATAN</a>
 439 </li></ul>
 440
 441 <p><i>Cameron Laird has written several <a href="http://starbase.neosoft.com/%7Eclaird/misc.writing/publications.html">other articles</a> for developer.com.  You can reach him at <a href="mailto:claird@neosoft.com">claird@neosoft.com</a>.</i>
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