ietf-dkim
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: SSP RR vs TXT [was Re: [ietf-dkim] SSP and o= values]

2006-03-30 13:08:46

On Mar 30, 2006, at 10:09 AM, Jim Fenton wrote:

There's a different situation for key records and policy/practice/ (petunia?) records. The choice of whether to use a new RR or a TXT key record should be retrieved is something that can be represented in the signature (the query type, q=, tag has been suggested which makes sense).

Agreed. The WG can do the right thing and define a binary key for future use. If there are few impediments, the future might be sooner than later.

The retrieval of "P" records is more of a problem, since in general there's nothing in the message to tell the verifier what to look for. This argues in favor of not having two ways to do this. Alternatively, a verifier could cache (even beyond the TTL of the DNS records) the type of record favored by a given domain, as a hint to what to look for first.

The policy records might also use PTR RRsets rather than a TXT RR or some other new record. Defining an open or closed-ended list of third-party signers provides more essential information than found using the current TXT record approach. The "r=" element should be removed.

_tps._dkim.<email-domain>. labels can offer the following information:

"*." = Open-ended.  (Non-exclusive list covering "-" and "~")
"."  = Closed-ended (Exclusive and no list that covers "!")
"-." = Never sends email. (Never and no list that covers ".")

Depending upon whether just the "." is seen or a "*." is found within the list, this scheme offers more useful information related to the sending domain.

Although a better approach would be to associate the EHLO with the signing-domain, the same strategy could be used to associate email- address domains with the signing-domain and essentially indicate who directly signs this domain's messages.

Here is an example of an exclusive list of signing domains for <email- domain>.

_tps._dkim.<email-domain>. PTR my-provider.com.
                           PTR my-other-provider.com.


A list of third-party signers could be used to adjust handling when rate-limiting might not be in place, or when the message does not appear to be properly signed.

Although this does not scale beyond what can be contained within a DNS response, there is name compression. For large organizations wishing to remain silent on who they use, they could either publish a list that with just "*." which means others will be signing their messages (perhaps the default assumed when no list is seen). If the organization used the "." label, this would mean only that organization signs their messages (perhaps they also use key delegation).

Just as there were concerns expressed regarding the opaque-identifier revocation overhead, the "^" per-user record represents even a greater concern!

-Doug


_______________________________________________
NOTE WELL: This list operates according to http://mipassoc.org/dkim/ietf-list-rules.html

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>