ietf-dkim
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Re: [ietf-dkim] Take two (was Re: Proposal for new text about multiple header issues)

2010-10-26 13:22:57

On Oct 25, 2010, at 9:58 PM, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:

8.14 Malformed Inputs
 
DKIM allows additional header fields to be added to a signed message without 
breaking the signature.  This tolerance can be abused, e.g. in a replay 
attack, by adding additional instances of header fields that are displayed to 
the end user or used as filtering input, such as From or Subject, to an 
already signed message in a way that doesn't break the signature.
 
The resulting message violates section 3.6 of [MAIL].  The way such input 
will be handled and displayed by an MUA is unpredictable, but in some cases 
it will display the newly added header fields rather than those that are part 
of the originally signed message alongside some “valid DKIM signature” 
annotation. This might allow an attacker to replay a previously sent, signed 
message with a different Subject, From or To field.
 
Because of this, DKIM implementers are strongly advised to reject or treat as 
suspicious any message that has multiple copies of header fields that are 
disallowed by section 3.6 of [MAIL], particularly those that are typically 
displayed to end users (From, To, Cc, Subject).  A signing module could 
return an error rather than generate a signature;  a verifying module might 
return a syntax error code or arrange not to return a positive result even if 
the signature technically validates.
 
Senders concerned that their messages might be particularly vulnerable to 
this sort of attack and do not wish to rely on receiver filtering of invalid 
messages can ensure that adding additional header fields will break the DKIM 
signature by including two copies of the header fields about which they are 
concerned in the signature (e.g. "h= ... from:from:to:to:subject:subject 
...). See Sections 3.5 and 5.4 for further discussion of this mechanism.

Looks fine to me (other than some light wordsmithing of the final paragraph - 
look like there's a "who" or "who are" missing).

Cheers,
  Steve
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