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Re: [mail-vet-discuss] Discussion of auth-header draft (fwd)

2008-10-10 05:42:54
Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:

Proposed diffs from the -16 draft, based on this discussion so far, 
are attached.

Comments?

The changes look good to me.
One question below.

@@ -1427,15 +1483,49 @@
   of hostnames whose "Authentication-Results" header fields are
   trustworthy; however, this list should initially be empty.

-   Proposed alternate solutions to this problem are nascent.  Possibly
-   the simplest is a digital signature on the header field that can be
-   verified by a posted public key.  Another would be a means to
-   interrogate the MTA that added the header field to see if it is
-   actually providing any message authentication services and saw the
-   message in question, but this isn't especially palatable.  In either
-   case, a mechanism needs to exist to verify that the host that appears
-   to have added the header field (a) actually did so, and (b) is
-   legitimately adding that header field for this delivery.
+   Proposed alternate solutions to this problem are nascent:
+
+   1.  Possibly the simplest is a digital signature protecting the
+       header field, such as using [DKIM], that can be verified by an
+       MUA using by a posted public key.  Although one of the main
+       purposes of this memo is to relieve the burden of doing message
+       authentication work at the MUA, this only requires that the MUA
+       learn a single authentication scheme even if a number of them are
+       in use at the border MTA.
+
+   2.  Another would be a means to interrogate the MTA that added the
+       header field to see if it is actually providing any message
+       authentication services and saw the message in question, but this
+       isn't especially palatable given the work required to craft and
+       implement such a scheme.
 

I am still trying to get my head around this, but I am thinking that 
defining a new ESMTP capability for "I provide authentication services 
and strip bogus Authentication-Results header fields" would be a half 
hour job, so why not do that?

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