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Re: [ietf-dkim] Wrong Discussion - was Why mailing lists should strip DKIM signatures

2010-04-27 14:20:15
On 4/27/10 10:34 AM, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Macdonald [mailto:macfisherman(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2010 10:05 AM
To: McDowell, Brett
Cc: Murray S. Kucherawy; ietf-dkim(_at_)mipassoc(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: [ietf-dkim] Wrong Discussion - was Why mailing lists
should strip DKIM signatures

     
That's interesting.  Let's make this concrete... I'll use myself as
       
an example.
     
X = me/PayPal.com
Y = this list/ietf-dkim(_at_)mipassoc(_dot_)org
Z = Google's Gmail service [1]

It is my assumption that someone subscribed to this list has a
       
gmail.com account (or a Yahoo.com account [2]).  Therefore, my use case
is simple.  I would hope that those of you reading this from your Gmail
or Yahoo! accounts actually receive this message.  If Z breaks the
signature, you won't see this.

how about Y breaking the signature? I see your message only because I
told gmail's filtering system to not put messages into the spam folder
for this list. Otherwise it would of gone into the spam folder.
Looking at the source of the message, I only see the list's DKIM
signature.
     
Y breaking the signature isn't relevant (in this hypothesis).  Y also says 
when it got the message from X, X's signature was intact.  That Y messed up 
the signature, making Z unable to verify it directly, is not important; Z 
trusts Y, so Z trusts Y's Authentication-Results: that says X's signature was 
fine when it got to Y.
   
While messages with intact DKIM signatures of financial institutions 
offers reasonable protection, acceptance of broken signatures validated 
by some third-party's authentication-results header would impose 
significant risk.    Any mailing list that does remove 
authentication-results headers would provide easy exploits of X.
Should the policy statements be ignored at that point?
     
In this hypothesis, they could be.  Or, they could be applied.  If X's ADSP 
says "all" or "discardable", and Z trusts Y, and Y claims X's message had a 
valid signature, ADSP is satisfied.
   
Acceptance of DKIM messages signed by Y is likely to be less strict than 
those by X, and likely to overlook broken signatures or lack of 
authentication-results headers.  However, an authorization scheme able 
to scale to any number of such lists using a single DNS transaction 
ensures X remains in control of the acceptance of their messages, 
without needing special private arrangements for making specific exceptions.

Since X has the most at stake, an authorization scheme would allow X to 
indicate which ADSP acceptance exceptions are desired.  The indication 
could be made on behalf of X through some designated vouching service, 
or directly by X when they they have audited the domains being used by 
them.  The ADSP record could include a flag to alert recipients of the 
existence of an added third-party authorization mechanism.

-Doug


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