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[spf-discuss] Fwd: Automatic key verification / CERT in DNS / RFC4398 (Was: [Announce] GnuPG 1.4.3 released)

2006-04-06 05:36:55
At 10:28 PM -0400 2006-04-04, Danny Mayer wrote:

 These three lead to one big question though:
   Can we start doing automatic key verification for mail !?

        See DKIM.

 This all though leads to a concern on the placing of the CERTS. Having a
 large user base would mean that one has say 600k records or more in the
 main zone for a domain, which gets reloaded every now and then when one
 needs to update it.

Think about ten million users, or fifty million. Each user having several hundred bytes (or even several KB) of data stored for them. Stored in the DNS. In a single flat zone. Bad idea. Like, really bad idea. Like, one of the worst DNS-related ideas I think I've ever heard of, at least in a very long time.

And it shares most of the same problems in this respect with DKIM, if you try to push DKIM to process data at the individual level as opposed to the domain level.

        Very highly non-scalable.

 Of course this will also require a lot of software to make it working,
 but this is going in the right direction! :)

Possibly, but I'm not convinced. There's lots of scalability issues that need to be given some serious thought before you just leap into the fray and start spraying about large DNS records for each user, regardless of any other factors that are involved.

--
Brad Knowles, <brad(_at_)stop(_dot_)mail-abuse(_dot_)org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

    -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
    Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

 LOPSA member since December 2005.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.

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