Dave Crocker writes:
We are not trying to replicate pgp or s/mime. We are trying to serve
an entirely different purpose. We are trying to say who is
responsible for injecting this message into the message transfer
service.
This is a red herring. Nobody's talking about replacing PGP
or S/MIME. We're talking about domain based assertions.
The mailing list processor is responsible for injecting the message
into the transfer service. Therefore the only signature that is valid
for mail coming from it is the mailing list signature. The original
authors are not accountable for the potentially arbitrary behavior of
mailing list processors.
I completely disagree. Mailing lists are nothing more than
special types of forwarders. With respect to the problem at
hand, they are no different than any intermediate MTA which
may or MAY NOT modify/add/delete the headers or body. To try
to say that the original sending domain has no
responsibility for injecting the message simply because it
traverses a mailing list is ludicrous. To whit: I have a
very strong suspicion that as you read this message that
you're not thinking that imc.org is responsible for the
content of this message, but instead... mike(_at_)mtcc(_dot_)com is
actually responsible for this message. Imc.org is merely
facilitating its transmission.
The ability to preserve end to end semantics is something
that is a huge strength of MASS. If you want hopwise
semantics -- which is what you're advocating even if a hop
is not limited to a transport hop -- you might just as well
stay with the various path based approaches and forget all
of the complexity of signing messages. We can do better.
Mike