[ietf-dkim] Re: Third-Party Signature Authorizations and Email-Address Restrictions
2007-11-28 17:45:50
On Nov 28, 2007, at 3:00 PM, Jim Fenton wrote:
Douglas Otis wrote:
The question is who taking responsibility and for what?
Does the signing domain indicated From email-address use is
restricted? If so, this could then shift content responsibility
onto the From email-address identity. If not, the signing domain
is only responsible for permitting some unknown users access.
Clearly, granting access says very little about content. Just
granting access without email-address restrictions requires
reputations to be based upon a collective behaviour of users to
which they grant access.
SSP does, indeed, deal specifically with the From email address. I
have no idea what this might have to do with responsibility for
content.
All headers are found in message content. DKIM is unrelated to the
envelope.
An identity associated with an email-address within message content
should not be assumed authenticated when a signing domain matches an
email-address domain found within the From, Sender, or Resent-*
headers. After all, asserting an SSP "ALL" might be to mitigate
spoofing complaints caused by messages submitted from other domains.
Signatures may only assure recipients where the particular message had
been submitted, but not whether the identity of the email-address
matching the domain of the signature has been authenticated. This is
what was meant by not being responsible for content.
A DKIM signature may only attest to the domain's stewardship at
excluding access to those who spam (spamming is a behaviour unrelated
to content). Excluding access does not require the authentication of
email-address identities. The account used for access and the email-
addresses submitted are often independent items. There are ways these
two items can be joined, but normally they are not. See Frank's note.
Let me state it differently then: If you're publishing an SSP
record other than "unknown", make sure you're not applying an
Originator Signature to spoofed mail.
Your use of "Originator Signature" seems to imply a signature that
contains a matching i= parameter and a domain or parent domain d=
parameter of the email-address found within the From header.
Per SSP draft:
,---
| The "Originator Address" is the email address in the From header
| field of a message [RFC2822], or if and only if the From header field
| contains multiple addresses, the first address in the From header
| field.
'---
A mailing-list can easily conform to an SSP "ALL" policy and yet sign
messages containing From headers where the owners of email-addresses
have not been authenticated. Adding scope that specifically asserts
authentication could be useful. I assume you mean the i= parameter
should not include the localpart. There is a corner case for a
semantic that asserts when i=localpart, this means the associated
identity has been authenticated. The problematic case would be with
g= wildcard restricted keys. For these keys, i= localpart inclusion
becomes _necessary_, even when the identity associated with the
localpart is not authenticated.
In other words, use of From email-addresses has been restricted to
authenticated owners. What happens when they wish to send a
message where a user is not authenticated, but where use of some
critical email-addresses are restricted. There are currently no
existing semantics to permit a mixed assertion, however actual use
is likely to confront such a mixture. And this must include
assertions about third-party domains (which includes sub-domains).
I'm not sure what "restricted" means, but I suppose I'll find out
when I read your draft.
You typically make an indirect assertion regarding whether an
Originator Address is "valid". I interpret this to be saying that the
provider restricts signing email-addresses where the localpart is
contained within the i= parameter to specific authenticated
identities. (Perhaps these identities would be defined as those who
have exclusive access to a mailbox associated with the email-
address.) The TPA-SSP draft defines the "-i" suffix added to the
"scope=" parameter to assert identities for the scoped headers are
authenticated. The TPA-SSP draft assumed rules regarding which header
was signed will apply when the signing and email-address domains
match. There are two different scopes for message content, the
(F)rom, and (O)ther being the Sender, or Resent-* headers. Only when
the From header is signed by a third-party domain would the TPA-SSP
scope indicating authentication of identities become critical for
domain parity.
-Doug
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