ietf-dkim
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [ietf-dkim] NO DKIM "POLICY"

2009-02-19 18:53:14

On Feb 19, 2009, at 2:27 PM, John Levine wrote:

What is the current recommended method to establish or expose that  
a DOMAIN should not be signed, is not expected to be signed and  
that any DKIM supportive receiver seeing a message with a signature  
from a purported domain should be rejected with full confidence?

That's easy: don't publish any key records.  If a verifier tries to  
look up a key record for a signature that doesn't exist, it should  
get the hint.

By design, a broken signature is equivalent to no signature.

Agreed.  However, treating a signing domain as just a reputation token  
is likely to result in slack handling.

Rather than utilizing i= values, when sub-domains are used to isolate  
reputation assessments, a strategy that employs a sub-domain  
relationship to override anti-spoofing checks is taking a considerable  
risk from a control standpoint.  There is nothing wrong with using i=  
values to isolate reputation streams within a DKIM domain.  Those  
checking reputations need to limit the number of unacceptable i=  
values reported before declaring the entire domain unacceptable.  This  
same limit is needed for sub-domains.

Currently, DKIM offers anti-spoofing protection for some 10 billion  
messages daily.   My brief use of an email-address on the IETF mailing  
list quickly resulted in spam spoofing this address.  If this email- 
address happened to have represented that of a financial institution,  
anti-spoofing protections would have been nearly automatic.  While  
some messages sent through a DKIM signing provider may receive just a  
third-party signature assure their acceptance, they would not enjoy  
the anti-spoofing benefits as defined in the charter.  Although for  
many this will not matter, for some it is critically important.

In Hector's case, depending upon how prevalent sub-domain reputation  
segregation becomes, a need to ensure no keys can be published within  
some sub-domain might become crucial.  The use of ADSP does not  
foreclose sub-domain spoofing, such as accounts.big-bank.com.   Not  
treating the d= value as opaque helps ensure DKIM remains safer to use.

-Doug

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