Re: [ietf-dkim] Re: An overview of cryptographic protocols to preventspam
2005-09-26 11:07:37
On Sep 25, 2005, at 11:40 PM, Amir Herzberg wrote:
John Levine wrote:
Note on the first page: I'd skip the comment about content
labels. In
the few places they've been tried (Korea, most notably) they've
been a
resounding failure, and there's no point in encouraging people to
waste time thinking about them.
Thanks for the feedback. Reference to that experiment (Korea) would
be appreciated.
I agree that labeling seems difficult to deploy. However, I think
that when there is a widely accepted label, e.g. ADV in subject
line, then sending appropriate content (advertisements) with this
label is an acceptable practice. Therefore, I do not regard this as
spam. Such well-labeled email can be easily filtered, of course,
and most recipients (and maybe mail servers) may do so. Do you
object and if so, why?
Offering a label that a message is an advertisement does _not_
indicate whether the message was solicited. Any advertisement,
labeled or not, representing one of perhaps an inordinate number of
such messages should _still_ be viewed as spam. Such messages are
primarily in the sender's interest, and primarily at the expense of
the recipient. The test for whether a message is spam should not be
solely based upon some header being falsified.
If 'ADV:' on the subject line were to mean "this is not spam," then
of course every spammer would use this label. If it were used
conscientiously to genuinely indicate an advertisement to an
individual requesting such information, then of course such a message
should not be filtered. As there must be a mechanism based upon
reputation to determine the integrity of the sender anyway, such
labeling would be of extremely little value. Assume responsible
senders would cease sending advertisement when requested, and that
such responsible senders also predicate sending based upon a request
or granted permissions.
In any case, may I suggest you respond to me privately or in an
appropriate forum e.g. asrg, since I think content labels are not
part of DKIM (of course DKIM can be applied to sign such labels).
DKIM itself could be viewed as a type of label that can be verified.
The domain of a compromised router does not need to be within the
recipient's domain, as you indicate.
There is a difference between a black-list and a black-hole list,
where black-hole list would be the preferred terminology describing
an IP address qualification mechanism.
The path based registration schemes are very prone to intra-server
attacks, in addition to man-in-the-middle attacks. Many MTA are
shared by multiple domains. There should be some mention that
mailbox-domain authorization schemes attempt to base authorization
upon visible headers, where this then violates normal conventions.
This is also true for SSP. The solution often used for cases where
authorization would inadvertently cause a message to be lost, is to
use open-ended authorization. Open-ended authorization may invite
exploitations and may cause messages to placed into "junk" folders,
rather than rejected with an indication of a delivery failure.
Your "ALL" chart lists '+', where this could be seen as the
"politically incorrect" mode. The normal approach would be to use
the open-ended '?' mode. Characterization of path based registration
as being simple to implement or alluding to lower CPU overhead is
misleading. These path based schemes may require an inordinate level
of DNS lookups consuming limited I/O resources, whereas CPU resources
used for cryptography are generally available and otherwise unused.
You also question the value of utilizing reputation based upon the
domain. The domain does carry more information than just the IP
address. IPv6 addressing may create a similar situation. A name
offers the age and the registrar of the domain. When considering the
number of shared MTAs, the use of path registration remains dubious,
whereas being able to verify the name offers greater value. Even
with DKIM, the mailbox-domain may not be assured and not be
verifiable. This is also true for the path registration techniques.
Authorizing a mail service _does not_ indicate that mailbox-domain
originated the message. There is far greater risks associated with
"poisoning" reputations based upon mailbox-domain authorizations,
which are mechanisms being currently proposed. Basing reputation
upon DKIM signatures should eliminate most poisoning concerns. This
would assume that a replay mechanism is in place.
Although some see BATV and SES as similar solutions, I would rather
see BATV used as an example for signing the bounce-address. See Dave
Crocker's explanation regarding the differences between these
approaches.
http://www.mhonarc.org/archive/html/ietf-asrg/2005-06/msg00033.html
-Doug
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