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Re: [ietf-dkim] DKIM Interoperability Event notes

2007-11-09 04:41:37
On Thu, 08 Nov 2007 23:36:02 -0000, Hector Santos <hsantos(_at_)santronics(_dot_)com> wrote:

They can make themselves look like cisco.com or any other HV domain and with the obvious failure and t=y, how will verifiers react to this?

The SSP specs says to ignore the failed validation.

The bad guys will use this with the HOPE they can get one foot in the door, in fact, verifiers might not even TRY to validate at all because a t=y will trigger a "SKIP DKIM" concept.

Surely, t=y will be used in one of two scenarios:

1. Someone is intending to roll out DKIM, and is trying it out. He is not sure whether he has implemented it right, so it may fail.

But in that case there will be no SSP record, or if there is one it will say "we do not sign (yet)".

2. An existing DKIM user is rolling out a new algorithm. As before, he may get it wrong and the signatures may fail.

BUT, if (as is likely) his SSP says "we sign everything", then he MUST continue to sign with his old algorithm, in addition to the new one which has "t=y" in it.

With those two provisos, the existing rule, to ignore any failed t=y signature (as though there had been no signature) makes perfectly good sense.

And, answering another point that was made, it may make good sense to report back to the signer on t=y signatures that failed, so that he can fix his bug. A t=y user can reasonably expect to receive such reports. OTOH, without a t=y attempts to regularly report failures would amount to harassment, and are a Bad Thing.

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