I\'m part of a company that has at least 1000 PC\'s distributed in different bui
ID: 654749 • Letter: I
Question
I'm part of a company that has at least 1000 PC's distributed in different buildings over a radius of 25 miles.
I've been asked to make a program to survey technical information on each PC.
Since not all of them share a LAN connection but all of them have internet access, my solution was to use a gmail account to share the encrypted data.
I've created client/server like services to send the data and retrieve it to the data base through emails, all of them using the same gmail account (to send and receive).
I know that this look a lot like a botnet...actually I think it is, since each client would be able to receive configuration mails from the server to request certain registry entries.
All external IP's are dynamic, the server is internal, the resolution to establish a trusted unattended connection would demand publishing the IP's somewhere, Dynamic DNS has been suggested but in terms of reliability it's just as safe as gmail.
Anyway my question is: will gmail detect all this traffic made on the same account as a botnet and close it? if so, should I use several accounts?
Explanation / Answer
It's unlikely that your account would be closed, however repetitive messages to and from the same address would likely trip their spam filters. This could make your system unreliable.
There are some serious threats to the confidentiality, availability, and integrity with this model as you are using a public email service. You will need to make sure you are encrypting and signing the message content independently of gmail's API. Truthfully you'd be better off using a client/server based model using tls.