spf-discuss
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Re: Announcement: Mailbox Reputation Scheme

2004-01-30 12:49:54
On Friday 30 January 2004 6:59 pm, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
I have been working on a specification for accreditation in SPF (attached).

Which is the wrong place to put it...

2) The term accreditation is pretty well established in the community after
the Aspen meeting. I do not see how the term 'peer' is relevant. 

acme.com IN TXT "v=mrn1 accreditor=example.net"

Is rather easier to read. Peer suggests to me something very different.

MRN is primarily a peer-to-peer directed graph, where peers (ie: 'friends' or 
'buddies') mutually vouch for each other with reciprocal links.

In such a system it shortcuts things a lot to have some commercial service 
that will 'be a buddy' to many people for cash. This is what *I* mean by an 
accreditation service. 

The only difference between such a service and an ordinary 'buddy' is that 
they will have a great many of peers - too many to want to put then in an MRN 
TXT records and little point in doing so. The accreditation service only 
wants to claim a few peers for itself - ie other accreditation services!

Hence the accreditors use a non-reciprocal peer link, where the accreditor 
vouches for the principal but the principal does not vouch for the 
accreditor.

I considered having a synonym 'accreditor=' but felt it would be a bit 
misleading, not to mention pointless.

I am not using the term to mean any of the things in your document. In fact I 
may change to a different term - "sponsor' which I rather like.
 
3) You don't need to commit to an accreditation policy. The peer scheme may
well work, looks to me like it would be easy to defeat but in the end the
filters will give empirical measurement of the effectiveness of the various
schemes.

Not committing to an accreditation policy is _exactly_ why SPF should not 
favour one.

4) It works much better as an SPF entry pointing to the existence of an mrn
record:

Except that would tie it to SPF.

5) Rather than form a new group it would be better to separate the spf group
into deployment and development sections.

But then it would be tied to SPF.

6) Creating new acronyms diltes the power of the SPF brand. 

On the contrary it avoids diluting SPF with issues that go beyond sender 
authentication. 

SPF is more likely to succeed if it does not have politically contentious 
features unrelated to authentication. Both MRN and your accreditation scheme 
have political/eonomic ramifications that SPF does not need.

Secondly, MRN could equally well work with RMX, DMP, DomainKeys, etc, so it 
would be confusing to apply the SPF label to it.

It's only relation to SPF is as an example of the kinds of application that 
become possible in a post-authentication world, and as an example of the 
kinds of innovation that would be stifled if SPF shortcuts the process by 
favouring it's own.

- Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Boresjo [mailto:dan(_at_)boresjo(_dot_)demon(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk]
Sent: Friday, January 30, 2004 12:06 PM
To: spf-discuss(_at_)v2(_dot_)listbox(_dot_)com
Subject: [spf-discuss] Announcement: Mailbox Reputation Scheme


Hello Everybody!

Following on from the various discussions here on the subject 
of sender 
reputation schemes, I would like to make call for 
participation in the 
"Mailbox Reputation Network". The URL is here:

http://www.polityresearch.com/mrn

Main features:
1) Decentralised and distributed system.
2) Immune to gaming.
3) Supports both grassroots and corporate organisational models.
4) Independent of any particular authentication scheme.
5) Policy-neutral with respect to scoring heuristics etc.

_and_

6) It's more fun than PKI, yet more scaleable than Friendster!

- Dan

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