On Apr 3, 2014, at 4:40 PM, Fred Baker (fred) <fred(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:
In view of recent issues in TurkTelecom and Indosat, it seems like the
simplest reason would be to ensure that data putatively obtained from the
IETF would in fact be obtained from the IETF.
From my perspective, I would support a statement to the effect that IETF
technology should be obtainable using https or whatever else we are
recommending as "secure.” I’d also be in favor of asking IETF contributors to
obtain and use PGP keys and/or DKIM encodings to sign messages. And of asking
that IETF tools not reformat email in ways that corrupt data that has been
signed.
To that end, I could imagine a requirement for some kind of roadmap. “The
tools that access the IETF SMTP and HTTP sites use protocols X, Y, and Z.
After <date>, we require them to use Secure X, Secure Y, and Secure Z, and
traffic originated by the IETF sites shall use such protocols."
Dear Fred,
XMPP provides an interesting feature called server federation. It would be
good to see the excellent work of Dukhovni and Parsons extended to include
authentication of sending servers (clients) to support federation. This is
something TLS supports but is rarely used. Such a feature could significantly
improve overall security especially in the wake of RTF messages exposing users
to remote code execution.
DKIM only covers message fragments and is unrelated to the actual sender by
design. A malicious link might be found in the Subject line that can be
followed with user clicks which may not have been signed or users might see
prepended From header fields which don't impact DKIM signature validity.
Regards,
Douglas Otis