On Tue, 8 Jan 2008 05:20:44 am Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
> On Mon, 7 Jan 2008, Daniel Black wrote:
> > perhaps the verification process could almost brute force the email list
> > mangles. This would involve:
> > 1. attempting the subject line unfudges (removing [])
> > s/Subject:/\([^[]*\)\[[^\]*] \?\(.*\)/\1\2/'
> > 2. attempting to remove the last 5 (configurable) lines off the email and
> > see if that passes.
>
> You certainly could do this, though it could require recomputing the hash
> several times which is a bit on the expensive side, and dangerous if you
> have an MTA waiting for a response from the server.

Is the incremental hash state approach acceptable? I was looking at 
./libdkim/dkim-canon.c and it does seem like a non-trival amount of effort.

> It's also worth noting that the discussions among the original DKIM
> implementors, as I recall, leaned in the direction of recommending that a
> failed signature should still be considered failed even if you can
> determine what mangling took place to cause it to fail, and thus determine
> what the original signed message looked like. 

If you can determine what the original signed message looked like and it 
verified ok can it be considered a pass?

"Yes" would certianly make it more useful to admins. Especially to those that 
don't want to debug dkim failures every time a user adds themselves to an 
email list. Admins may need to think wider to determine if this would 
introduce risk in replay attacks by the appending short amounts of text. 

> This is to some extent what 
> the "z=" tag is for.

Useful for debugging a failure with the assumed cooperation of the sender in 
adding the "z=" flag. Not sure any admin would want to be debugging for email 
list traffic for DKIM failures considering its a known risk in the standard.

> > Yes this going to be really ugly to implement. Is it worth it?
> >
> > Am I missing something in the standard that says a verifying server
> > should not attempt to verify the original signature?
>
> There's nothing in the standard that makes that improper.  In fact the
> standard is deliberately vague on the topic of interpreting
> multiply-signed messages.  It's up to the verifier to decide how to handle
> them.  The only guidance it provides is to say that one can't rely on the
> order of the signatures to be meaningful because we've seen header order
> get mangled in transit before.
>
> The current libdkim implementation evaluates all of them by default, in
> the order in which they appear in the headers.  The filter doesn't allow
> you to say which one(s) to prefer, but it could if that turns out to be a
> good idea.  The library allows the caller to specify which ones it wants
> to consider and in which order.

This would make sence on a small volume server where you add a signature now 
and then for emailing lists that you choose to trust. A large volume server 
would require the user to self manage a whitelist of signatures for 
themselves which isn't impossible either.

-- 

Daniel Black
--
Proudly a Gentoo Linux User.
Gnu-PG/PGP signed and encrypted email preferred
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