Subject: Re: [bug#29528] Add blacknurse

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2017 09:41:31 +0100

Hi,

Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]> skribis:

>> +      (home-page "https://github.com/jedisct1/blacknurse")
>> +      (synopsis "Proof of Concept for the Blacknurse attack")
>> +      (description
>> +       "Simple Proof of Concept for the Blacknurse attack.
>> +Blacknurse is a low bandwidth ICMP attack that is capable of doing denial
>> +of service to well known firewalls.")
>
> The first fragment is not a full sentence.
>
> Looking at this package I wonder why it should be part of Guix as it is
> merely malware.  I don’t see any reason why this should be installable
> through Guix.  We are not in the habit of providing packages for
> exploits.  Putting it in “networking” makes it seem like this would be a
> useful networking application, but it really is not.  It just
> demonstrates a bug in networked devices.
>
> @Ludo: what do you think?

Indeed.  I see two issues here:

  1. a “proof of concept” is typically something for experts of the
     field to study, rather than generally useful software;

  2. it’s a tool whose purpose is to perform DoS attacks on routers, and
     I find it questionable to provide it in Guix (not to mention that
     there’s no shortage of such programs that we could add!).

So overall I’m reluctant to including it in Guix.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.