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[mail-vet-discuss] Proposed "header.b" tag for DKIM signatures

2010-03-24 11:33:23
[*tap* *tap* is this thing still on?]

I mentioned this at the APPS area discussion at the IETF on Monday of this 
week, and I'd like to get the ball rolling on it.

One thing that was brought up way back in the early DKIM years, but dropped 
then as unimportant, was the idea that Authentication-Results needs a way to 
specify which signature a DKIM result is conveying.  Since more than one 
signature might be on a message from the same domain, we can't rely on 
"header.d" and "header.i" to be able to make this distinction.

For example: A message comes to you with two signatures, both from the signer. 
The only distinction is that one signature has an "l=" tag and one does not.  
The message was altered by a mailing list.  Therefore, the signature with "l=" 
passes when you try it, and the other one fails.  You create a compliant 
Authentication-Results: header field to add to the message.  With the current 
specification, the best you can do is say "dkim=pass header.d=example.com; 
dkim=fail header.d=example.com" and perhaps rely on signature order to match 
them up.

I propose that we need a new tag, "header.b", which will contain the first 
several characters of the actual digital signature, which is pretty much 
guaranteed to be unique among signatures present.  This will allow unambiguous 
matching of signatures with results.

I have this now in a draft that I plan to move through the Applications area of 
the IETF as an individual submission since it's fairly minor:

http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-kucherawy-authres-header-b/

Comments welcome.

-MSK
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