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[ietf-dkim] Re: comments on the threats draft

2005-10-21 13:38:13
Stephen Farrell wrote:


Just the last one:

Jim Fenton wrote:

Stephen Farrell wrote:


9. (Part of #2 above really but worth calling out) DKIM creates new
opportunities for service providers (key managers, DNS providers) to sort-of revoke a domain's ability to send mail. Those should be discussed so we can minimise them to the extent possible.


I'm not sure why this would more of an issue here than revoking a domain's ability to receive mail by fiddling with their MX records.


Not necessarily more of an issue, but isn't it a bit different
since the DNS provider for the sending domain is now most likely
causing the vulnerability, rather than the DNS provider of the
receiving domain? IMO that's a significant enough difference.


I'm trying to understand why this would be an issue. What would be the motivation for the DNS provider to do this, especially when a domain can very easily move to a different provider?


True, but there're two answers here:

a) While I'm doing the vulnerability analysis I don't care about
motivation (which is roughly related to the probability of occurrence),
but I should still recognise the vulnerability. This vulnerability is
I think different to the MX record case where we're messing with the
recpient's DNS data and so ought be recognised.

Fair enough. Since this threat is not discussed in DKIM -base I have added an additional subsection under "Attacks on Message Signing" describing this. But the threat goes in both directions: the attacker that can influence DNS could add records as well as interfere with the domain's ability to send mail, and I have noted that.


b) I could bribe someone to make the mail from your domain less
likely to arrive, in which case motivation == € :-)

I agree that's a motivation (and that motivation or the lack thereof shouldn't be a factor in what we document). But hopefully the bribery part is out of scope, otherwise we will have a _very_ long list of threats.

-Jim
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