The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["Roger B.A. Klorese" <address@concealed>]

<address@concealed> wrote:

> As you likely know, it is really trivial to forge email, and so allowing 
> admin commands to be submitted via email (as opposed to the 
> MD5-hash-authenticaiton-based moderation commands) would be amazingly 
> insecure, unless you also  mandate S/MIME signatures...

Or, simply, passwords in the email. Non-academic civilians who just want to 
chat about their country dancing have no idea what an S/MIME signature is - 
usually their email accounts are at Gmail or Yahoo or even AOL. 


> By 'password approval for admin commands', do you mean asking for 
> re-authentication by admins when they do a major command via the web?  

No. I mean allowing a password to be sent with the command. The extra 
confirmation cycle is viewed as unnecessary hassle. 


> However, it might cause issues with sites such as ours which use an 
> external auth mechanism (two-factor via Shibboleth), as in this case it 
> would not be able to use the web server to handle authentication.

Again, civilians, and especially, civilians who want to admin exclusively by 
email and not use the web interface.