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Re: [ietf-822] WSJ/gmail/ML, was a permission to...

2014-05-03 16:14:13
On 5/3/2014 2:59 PM, Paul Smith wrote:

Who is the 'author' of the message? The message you received is NOT
the one I sent. So, I'm not the author, so why am I in the 'From'
field? So, arguably, the From field should be changed. Possibly it
should be changed to:

From: paul(_at_)pscs(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk, ietf-822(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org

because we both, "collaboratively", wrote the message. However, this
would probably break some mail clients/filters/etc because using
multiple From addresses is not "normal".

Paul,

You need to translate this technical philosophy into client/server protocol rule which means that the authoring domain has authorized resigning with a DMARC policy. Otherwise, its will be detected as an unauthorized signer, spoofed mail.

It is far easier to fix DMARC which is still in draft form than to get into complex, borderline ethical, long time taboos of tampering with the 5322.From.

To do a visual display "Posted on behalf of" does not require a header change. That could be an online MUA backend server rendering or offline MUA mail reader that takes the mail headers:

   From:  Paul Smith <paul(_at_)pscs(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk>
   List-Id: <ietf-822.ietf.org>
   List-Post:  <mailto:ietf-822(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>

and displays it in some way in the MUA:

   From: Paul Smith (Posted by ietf-822.ietf.org)

But thats not the problem. The problem is when we dealing with the BAD mail.

Lets suppose you began to sign all your mail with pscs.co.uk at your server so that all your outbound mail has:

   From:  Paul Smith <paul(_at_)pscs(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk>
   Dkim-Signature:  d=pscs.co.uk

This is considered a 1st party signature.

An central issue is how strong do you wish to make this signing practice. You need to tell the world what to expect about your signed mail:

   Do you always sign your mail or is it optional?
   Do you always sign your mail with psca.co.uk?
   Do you allow others to sign on your behalf?
   If so, who?

To do this, suppose you published a DMARC record:

   v=dmarc1 p=reject ......

which basically means only psca.co.uk always the mail. No one else.

Now, when you send mail to non-list receivers, direct to people, you will want the protection that DMARC offers at these receiver sites.

However, when you send mail to the IETF-822 list receivers, hopefully you want the list to also protect your domain by honoring your policy and only allow a valid 1st party signature submissions from you, reject it if not valid.

But now you also want to give the list server permission to resign. So basically what you want is to give the ietf.org domain permission to resign. How is that done?

There are currently one way to do this using ADSP ATPS, ASL or TPA extensions.

ADSP was used as to piggy back to extend 3rd party policy information. Since ADSP is now historic, lets switch this to DMARC instead with the extensions.

Using ASL, your DMARC record changes to:

   v=dmarc1 p=reject asl=ietf.org ......

This simple small scale change fixes the problem by allowing all parties to see that your domain is allowing ietf.org to resign the mail. It is "small scale" because you would be limited in the record size in how many domains you can fit in a TXT DMARC string record.

For larger scale, using Murray's ATPS (RFC6541 ) extension, the DMARC record is:

   v=dmarc1 p=reject atps=y ......

The atps=y tag say to check for "_atps." zone record for the signing domain, ietf.org, authorization. You can create and see this record at the wizard http://www.winserver.com/public/wcadsp

  ;
  ; ATPS (v01) Zone Records for author-domain: psca.co.uk
; Generated by wcMakeADSP v3.11(c) copyright 2010 Santronics Software,Inc.
  ;

  _adsp._domainkey  TXT ("dkim=all; atps=y; asl=ietf.org;")
PQ6XADOZSI47RLUIQ5YOHG2HY3MVJYOO._atps TXT ("v=atps01; d=ietf.org;")

I think this is is very simple and elegant solution. Doug has TPA with similar zone records tags and labels to lookup. Its all basically the same ideas. Either way, we somewhat resolved the technical problem but we are left with the practical problem of getting the list operators/servers to even bother to do any POLICY lookup of any kind.

If the IETF had supported ADSP/ATPS back in DKIM-WG, this would of been a done deal long ago. Yahoo's DMARC record would of been:

     v=dmarc1 p=reject atps=y

and there would be 30,000 ATPS records for all the purported list that yahoo says their users are members of.

30,000 DNS records for _atps authorizations? Is that too much? I'm sure it is, but i don't see realistic for most domains to see close to that much, not even 100 or even 50. How many list domains do you believe too? What would be the average number of list domains the average user belongs too?

The IETF SHOULD endorse 3rd party Authorization ideas so we can begin to finally solve this problem.

I'm done.


--
HLS


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