ietf-dkim
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Re: [ietf-dkim] Underscore considerations

2006-06-08 18:06:50

On Jun 8, 2006, at 5:51 PM, Michael Thomas wrote:

Douglas Otis wrote:


On Jun 8, 2006, at 5:08 PM, Michael Thomas wrote:

Even if you could, and even if a registrar were boneheaded enough to shoot their own foot, how hard could it possibly be for a DKIM verifier to enumerate the TLD's and not accept selectors from that set of blacklisted _domainkey
delegations? Am I missing something?


Imagine a large corporation issues private keys to everyone under their highest level domain. Why? Because it is easy, which is the justification made for the 'i=' subdomain feature in the first place.

These individual users can specify any subdomain where perhaps their localpart is restricted and still have it annotated as verified. Now some of these keys are captured by the new worm affecting some program. Spammers can now send valid email messages using billions of different email-addresses all thanks to the convenience provided for transmitting messages with the i=(_at_)subdomain feature.

Until the selector is revoked by big-domain. This is a non-issue, and is certainly
not the issue under discussion.

But this is the issue being discussed. These are serious security concerns. There is zero containment of local-part namespace between any subdomains. This too becomes a serious concern and is one of the problems created. Even if a higher level domain wanted to do DKIM safely, the MUA signing feature would be a disaster as a result of this dubious feature.

-Doug
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