ietf-mxcomp
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Re: User experience

2004-04-06 12:16:59

At 11:54 AM 4/6/2004, Markus Stumpf wrote:

On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 10:26:28AM -0700, Harry Katz wrote:
> 1. Whenever possible, we must validate the domain used on the From line
> of the message, the RFC2822 From header to be precise. Because that's
> what the user sees.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but isn't that exactly what PGP and
S/MIME does? (ok, it validates the user, not only the domain)


No, I don't believe either of these include the From or any header in the
integrity check of the mail message.  At least I don't believe PGP does.
I think you've mentioned in an earlier message, these fields are very
malleable in today's mail infrastructure and difficult to integrity check.

Mark


We already have a mechanism that is perfectly capable to verify 2822.From,
so why should we build another? Isn't it much easier so simply push
the distribution of this existing method (i.e. support in MUAs) than to
build a new system that probably is less efficient?

When signing messages one could make use of muliple keysigns, such that
a message is both signed by the key of a user and by a key for a domain
and the public key for that domain is e.g. stored in DNS.

May I also bring a caveat here: we should not use DNS based verification
with MUAs. Still (and probably also in the future) a lot of eMail readers
are behind firewalls and they read their mail on computers that
don't have a direct connection to the Internet and they cannot access
DNS from the MUA when reading their eMails.
Or they simply poll their eMails and read offline.

        \Maex

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