On Aug 23, 2005, at 12:49 PM, Earl Hood wrote:
On August 20, 2005 at 18:21, Douglas Otis wrote:
DKIM should provide the mechanism to facilitate accountability in
an acceptably reliable fashion.
Therefore, you are implying that domains may practice policies that
selectively sign messages based on what they want to account for.
Signing will have greater value for a legitimate sending domain. An
attractive feature of DKIM should include an ability to quickly
correlate abuse and facilitate feedback aimed at rapid control.
Signatures provide a means for the sending domain to add account
tracking tags. I strongly feel this should be done as a standardized
convention. This tagging should allow opportunistic identifications
of authors, without any formal association through various records.
Attempts to publish all associations needed at the author level would
be prohibitive, but opportunistic methods where the MUA captures
bindings of identifiers would be practical, and this also allows the
detection of cross-domain forgery, even when no outbound server
offers any mailbox-address constraint. Clearly, less is much more.
For example, an ISP may sign all messages from their customers that
submit messages for transmission, but not sign messages that pass
through a forwarding service they offer to customers (regardless if
the messaging being forwarded is signed or not).
Not re-signing a message already signed makes good sense. Passing
unsigned messages retains the tracking difficulty which benefits no
one but the abusers. Getting to the bottom of a problem as quickly
as possible remains in the interest of the domain offering transit,
as well as their recipients. This would provide motivation to ensure
all messages are signed, as well as not re-signing previously signed
messages. Speed is of the essence in stopping and preventing abuse.
Don't get in the way.
Things like anti-spoofing and anti-forgery should not be part of
DKIM?
Attempts to directly address anti-spoofing with DKIM risks creating
problems that may limit wider deployment. Already there is the
problem
with From -> Sender, and per user-keys due to expectations the
signature
is bound to some mailbox address. Both of these issues entail a fair
amount of risk. Unfortunately these efforts may only increase
recipients susceptibility, rather than the intended protections.
You seem fixated on mailbox-level forgery when no one is really
discussing it wrt DKIM. Please focus your arguments on domain-level
forgery, which appears to be what DKIM currently tries to address.
Once anyone suggests DKIM will protect the mailbox-domain from
unauthorized use, this becomes an endless debate with respect to
which header's mailbox-domain is involved. Whether first-party or
third-party signing is authorized. Which mailbox-address should be
considered within a header. On and on. Don't forget the need to
consider systemic effects. Until there can be a reasonable
expectation _anything_ considered "protected" is sure to be seen by
the recipient in the same manner as it is being assured, it remains a
fool's quest. Worse, these efforts likely create false assurances
and endless administrative snags. The simpler the better. Let's
lighten the load at the onset. There is always next semester.
You seem to be stating that any domain-level forgery protection is
impossible without mailbox-level forgery protection, but I am not
convinced of this.
Within the signature header, there should be an assertion what level
of binding is needed to best protect the identity of the message's
author. As MUAs are next to worthless at making assurances beyond
pretty names, a new generation of MUAs is needed. These newer MUAs
should be capable of capturing the related details seen with a
particular message to be able to opportunistically offer "author"
level protections. In the case where the signing assurance indicates
only a mailbox-domain and the signing-domain should be included
within the MUA's binding, then with just this single capture, the
entire domain remains protected. Communicating this information
directly within the message itself removes the need for a domain-wide
assertion. If the recipient never received mail from some entity, it
would not likely as successful as a phish anyway. I would also
expect that part of the MUA's capture process, the user would be
shown the signing domain.
Yes, within a given domain, one person can attempt to forge the
identity of another person within the same domain. However, it
appears DKIM does not want to address this problem. It only wants to
address cases where one domain tries to forge another (here is where
SSP plays a critical role). Forgery within the scope of a single
domain is outside of DKIM's scope.
Here is where SSP derails when there are efforts to directly protect
mailbox-addresses. I see value where a domain-wide assertion
indicates the use of DKIM, but I do not see value attempting to
indicate there is some type of mailbox-address protection without
that enabling an exploit. Suggesting that a mailbox-domain must
always be signed, and perhaps signed by domain x, y, or z creates
problems, as I have mentioned.
If DKIM can provide domain-level forgery protection, domains then
only need to manage forgery among the mailboxes under its control:
a divide-n-conquer strategy.
I am of the view that DKIM without direct association with mailbox-
addresses offers tremendous value. Mixing DKIM with mailbox-address
will likely offer negative benefits.
-Doug
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