During IETF 108, the chairs realized that there was interest in Dave's
RFC5322.Sender draft.

This starts a Call for Adoption for draft-crocker-dmarc-sender

The draft is available here: 
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-crocker-dmarc-sender/<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdatatracker.ietf.org%2Fdoc%2Fdraft-crocker-dmarc-sender%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cdavid.i%40ncsc.gov.uk%7C8b6f69bd79a0456b083a08d83d605162%7C14aa5744ece1474ea2d734f46dda64a1%7C0%7C0%7C637326831179930300&sdata=essow9o1nmqARNXCr%2BUFkBhUwomyBq0E0dpxzzK7q9E%3D&reserved=0>

Currently, the draft is marked as "Standards Track".  The chairs feel if the
working group does adopt this, it should begin as "Experimental".  If we start
to see adoption of this work, this can be changed back to "Standards Track" 
before
Working Group Last Call.  Of course, we welcome input from the working group on 
this.

Please review this draft to see if you think it is suitable for adoption, and
send any comments to the list, clearly stating your view.

There's some good thinking in the document, that however leads me to a 
different solution space. There are also some bits which aren't clear enough 
for me to fully analyse the security impact, and some places where I think it's 
lacking.

In a little more detail:
- The reflection that mediators are going to have to implement approaches like 
From-rewriting for at least a while leads me to think that standardising From 
rewriting is a better way to go. Standardising would allow recipient systems to 
undo the From-rewriting if they trust the intermediary and the email is 
authenticated (perhaps simple DKIM, perhaps something ARC-related). This has 
the benefit that the intermediary doesn't need to worry about whether it's 
trusted by the recipient, or whether the recipient has implemented <insert new 
system here>. I agree with everyone who thinks it's somewhat distasteful, but 
seems least-worse to me given today's email environment.
- It's not clear to me in the doc which domain is being referred to in various 
places. eg assuming From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>, Sender: 
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>, which domain's DMARC policy 
should have the snd tag? If I never add the snd tag to _dmarc.from.example, do 
I get to keep today's behaviour?
- It turns a fact based check 'did the DMARC checks pass for the From domain' 
to a fuzzier reputation based one. This *may* be similarly effective at scale 
against volume spam, though I'm sceptical. I don't believe it's true for 
low-volume spear-phishing where 'a few getting through while the reputation 
system trains itself' isn't good enough.
- Comparing this to ARC, there's no passing of information about what 
authentication checks an intermediary did, nor a statement that an intermediary 
should be doing strict DMARC authentication and not passing on things which 
fail. That makes the 'trust' decision at a receiver much harder as you don't 
know if any authentication has taken place.
- As a reputation/trust based mechanism, it shares weaknesses with ARC - 
difficulty of bootstrapping, and favouring large and existing players. So I 
don't think it's expanding the solution space much, and risks distracting from 
ARC and then running into similar issues.
- The absence of a mechanism to get away from From-rewriting or similar (even 
in the long term), means this would be additional complexity with little, if 
any practical upside.

Given the above, I don't think this is a fruitful path, so I don't support 
adoption at this time.

Regards,
David

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