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Re: [ietf-dkim] New Issue: 4.2 needs new Attack Item: Inconsistent Signature vs Policy Attacks

2006-01-31 10:56:55

SSP is not necessary if a valid originating address signature is found.

This has always struck me as an astonishingly powerful observation.

It means that we can have entirely independent lines of discussion. One for the creation and handling of a successful signature. The other for all other scenarios.

In particular, it means that the signature work can be partitioned from the non-signature work. (To anticipate a mis-reading of this comment: I am not saying that the two are not equally important. Merely that each can receive its own focus of effort.)

My reading of the comments about the signature mechanism, versus comments on the SSP mechanism, is that the former tend to represent very narrow, crisp, technical details, whereas the latter tend to be far more conceptual.

Given that the signature mechanism was carefully designed to re-use quite a bit of well-understood mechanism, it is not surprising that review and revision to it can be so crisp. This tends to permit efficiently understanding the problem and usually means efficiently fixing it.

Given that SSP pertains to a topic that has little, if any, Internet-scale standardization or operations history, and given that it pertains to human/organizational rules, rather than lower-level bit-twiddling, it is also not a surprise that discussion about it requires wandering around the concept space rather more.

d/
--

Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
<http://bbiw.net>
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