spf-discuss
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Re: [spf-discuss] Phishing passing thru spf = not useful to me.

2007-04-20 05:12:08
On Thursday 19 April 2007 23:42, Adrian de los Santos wrote:
After 4 days of my original question (how to prevent phising that
uses fake  From information) and reading all the answers and doing my
own research, i can say that:


- There is no working tool that prevents or authenticates internet
mail (domain keys, spf, sender-id, etc.)

This is true.  SPF is a piece of the puzzle.  DK/DKIM has potential to be 
another significant piece, but until their (I'm part of the DKIM WG) policy 
protocol work is done and the reliability of the cryptographic protocol is 
established in Internet scale use, it's premature to say.  Sender-ID does an 
excellent job of protecting the resent-sender header.  If that's important to 
anyone, they should do Sender-ID.

- There is nothing useful commercial or open source that prevents
phishing

No, but I think we are getting close.  I think that Stuart's discussion about 
combinging reputation with SPF is a strong point in the correct direction.  
I've been involved in some other, similar research work that is promising 
(just research at this point, no product yet).

- The problem it's not in the tools, the protocol itself SMTP was
never designed to prevent this from happening and the protocol itself
needs to be redone, it was good 10+ years ago, now it just look silly
that anyone can forge an email message and there is no real way to
prevent it. Instead of wasting time and effort trying to solve
problems created by the protocol why not redesign the protocol ???
who is doing that ???

That has been proposed.  In my opionion there is too much momentum behind SMTP 
to stop and redesign it.  If this does happen it's going to be some other 
non-email protocol that just eats smtp's lunch.  Maybe some kind of 
RSS/Jabber something.  I don't know.

Scott K

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