On Monday, September 20, 2021 2:15:58 PM EDT Alessandro Vesely wrote:
> On Fri 17/Sep/2021 15:42:12 +0200 Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > On September 17, 2021 1:15:40 PM UTC, Benny Lyne Amorsen 
<[email protected]> wrote:
> >>Scott Kitterman <[email protected]> writes:
> >>> How do you define "First Hop" without enabling spoofers to trivially
> >>> bypass DMARC checks by forging more than one hop of headers?
> >>
> >>It wouldn't matter. Sensible mailing lists would reject non-first-hop
> >>mails for domains with p=validate. Spoofers can still spoof directly,
> >>but they cannot use mailing lists to spread their spoofed mails.
> 
> Indeed, it might be better to specify that the policy is intended for MLMs
> and similar mediators.  They usually happen to be the first external hop,
> which helps authentication but is not the key.
> 
> >>This is a marked upgrade from p=none which most domains are forced to
> >>use at the moment.
> 
> Yes.  Although authentication results take part in most local filtering
> recipes, this policy provides for clear, protocol level behavior.
> 
> >>Then as infrastructure improves, recipients will start to reject
> >>incoming non-first-hop mail with p=validate if it does not have a valid
> >>ARC header.
> 
> ARC has different problems.
> 
> > If the point is that intermediaries that expect to be the first hop should
> > reject failures for p=None, they can already do that by rejecting on SPF
> > fail.
> spf=pass does not imply first hop.  Actually MLM mail often passes SPF
> check.
> > No need to add complexity to DMARC to get there.
> 
> The added complexity is really minimal.  I agree that this proposal may
> conflict with the need to simplify DMARC.
> 
> > If there's consensus that adding something like this to DMARC as an
> > intermediate step for intermediaries only would be useful, then I think
> > there are multiple issues.  One, which is resolvable, is that validate
> > isn't the right name.
> I had thought p=mlm-validate, then I simplified it.  Do you have better
> names?
> > I think getting the naming and semantics right would be critical.
> 
> Indeed.
> 
> > I don't think this can get past backwards compatibility problems though. 
> > The p tag is a mandatory part of the record and any new value will be
> > seen as invalid by all existing DMARC implementations, so you'd have to
> > bump the version.
> I don't think we need a different version to say something so trivial as:
> 
>     Unrecognized values must be ignored.
> 
> That point is missing in the DKIM spec.  RFC 7489 just says:
> 
>     DMARC records follow the extensible "tag-value" syntax for DNS-based
>     key records defined in DKIM [DKIM].
> 
> But RFC 7376 only says:
> 
>     Unrecognized *tags* MUST be ignored.
> 
> It doesn't say that unrecognized values, in general, must be ignored.  It
> says so for individual tag values, such as unrecognized canonicalization
> algorithms, Unrecognized query mechanisms, Unrecognized algorithms,
> Unrecognized key types, and Unrecognized flags.
> 
> For the receiver behavior, to consider the record invalid would be
> equivalent to p=none, which is correct.  However, feedback reports tags
> shouldn't be invalidated.

That's not specified in RFC 7489, so it's an assumption that this is how the 
world works.  At best it's undefined and I don't think we can engineer 
interoperability based on assumptions about how current implementations 
address undefined behavior.

Also, in my experience anyway, mailing lists aren't a significant source of 
problematic spam and so I don't think doing things to solve what is mostly 
already a non-problem is really needed.

Let's not do this.

Scott K

> >  I don't think we want to do that.
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> > Also, doing anything based on an ARC header field from anything other than
> > a trusted source is a recipe for failure.  I've already seen cases where
> > spoofed email got accepted due to ARC from an untrusted source.  Don't
> > forget the limitations of ARC.
> 100% agreed.  While this proposal doesn't solve the MLM problem, it can
> partially help a recipient to learn whether a message was DMARC aligned when
> it arrived at the list, which is one of ARC's aims.
> 
> 
> Best
> Ale




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