Murray,

>> I think that the "registration problem" is a red
>> herring after all.  There's no deterministic way to decide what's a
>> legitimate mailing list (or other re-signer), any more than there's any
>> way to deterministically decide what's a legitimate originator.  Those
>> determinations are made heuristically outside DMARC.

> Numerous proposals have appeared over the years to solve the Mediator
> problem and its ilk, all of which involve advertising in some way that
> two domains are related somehow.  The favorite example is "A can sign B's
> mail", with the implication being "and you should act as if B signed it".

Ah, okay; in that case I will respond to your summary:

> The registration problem is not a red herring because it doesn't
> exist, but because it is intractable.  Thus, any response to the
> third-party problem that relies on a solution to that problem
> (which includes ATPS, DSAP, and TPA) is probably not viable.

I agree.

But I think that some of the "re-signing" schemes being proposed at
the moment do *not* require this type of registration, so in those
cases, the registration problem wouldn't apply.  If A is not "signing
B's mail", but rather, "signing its own modifications to B's message",
then the evaluation of the two signatures doesn't require a published
or pre-existing relationship between the two domains.

Under at least one of the proposals, it can be determined that "yes, A
signed the mods, and if the mods are removed to re-generate the original
message, B signed the original message".  If we have that, then I think
the question becomes: if this is to be a DMARC-like scheme, how do we tie
A's signature to some kind of relevant header field, since the "From:"
header is already "reserved" for the original signer.

Now despite injunctions on this list against referring to the user
interface, the fact is that DMARC uses the "holy From: header" to extract
the "alignable domain".  Unless I'm gravely mistaken, the reason for
that *is* indeed that this field is shown to the user (in some form)
by every user agent out there, and the user is thought to place a fair
deal of confidence in the "truth" of that header.  Unless we can state
something similar with respect to another header, I suspect that
anything we propose will be considered to be watering down DMARC to an
unacceptable extent.  :-(


Anne.
-- 
Ms. Anne Bennett, Senior Sysadmin, ENCS, Concordia University, Montreal H3G 1M8
[email protected]                                    +1 514 848-2424 x2285

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