RE: namedroppers, continued

At 08:28 AM 12/2/2002 -0800, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
> The only way to resolve this issue properly would be to require every
> submission to an IETF mailing list to be cryptographically signed (PGP
> or S/MIME), to require the subscribers to register their signing key and
> to then filter the mail sent out on the list so that only signed mail
> gets through.
I would be in favor of that, personally, as long as we can ensure that the 
appropriate signature facility (be it RSA, PGP, or whatever) is freely 
available to all who need to use it. The issue here is not us corporate 
types who have a business reason to buy the software, it is the students 
who often lack the funds. The big issue would be the procedures for posting 
one's key to the appropriate place - what is to stop a spammer from posting 
a key and sending the spam anyway? I'm not proposing a mechanism, but 
someone who is good at such things might well find it of value.
It doesn't address the "off topic" issue. As you say, that could be left to 
a working group chair equiped with formal procedures developed by consensus 
within the work group or adopted by the working group from a more general 
place (ie, the IETF could suggest a procedure, and the WG could adopt it if 
it didn't feel another procedure would be better).
I have had a private exchange, over the past few days, with someone who 
wished that the IETF would please document some good spam-elimination 
procedure, so that it could be used world-wide to completely eliminate 
spam. I think that boils down to "provide a global PKI" in this solution, 
and presumes that spammers are incapable of using one. That might be a 
great research topic. Too bad nobody has ever thought of it before; we 
could really use the outcome of that research. (OK, so it's a lame attempt 
at humor...)
I think it was Steve Bellovin that suggested a procedure for reducing the 
utility of spoofing source addresses in emails; if not, it was me and I 
happened to suggest something his favorite algorithm fit into, by having a 
host in each mail domain (mailid.example.com) be able to assert that its 
domain had or had not sent an email within a given recent  time period 
whose MD5 hash, when divided by <vector of prime numbers> resulted in 
<vector of remainders>. I could write that up in an internet draft if folks 
think it makes sense. That would be a more global procedure that didn't 
require a PKI and only addressed spoofed addresses.