On Thu, Mar 6, 2025 at 1:36 PM Michael Thomas <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 3/6/25 1:22 PM, John Levine wrote:
> > It would be reasonable to design DKIM2 to make signing multiple messages
> fast,
> > e.g., if messages only have different headers, reuse the body hash.  But
> that's
> > just an optimization.
>
> I think this appeal to "efficiency" is something of a red herring. I was
> pretty concerned back in the day that the cost of RSA operations would
> be significant, but it turns out that they weren't. That was 20 years
> ago and lots of Ticks and Tocks have happened in the mean time. This is
> especially true if you're doing spam filtering which is expensive and
> ought to be done both sending and receiving.
>
> But I looked at this message's source and it has 4 signatures from
> google: 2 ARC signatures, 1 DKIM, and one Google DKIM signature which I
> have no idea what it is. Gmail is probably the largest mailbox provider
> in the world and they didn't seem to be too resistant to running
> experiments that incur RSA signing operations.
>

I mean, it is provably more efficient to avoid doing unnecessary hashes,
but I don't think in this context that the win is significant even at a
large operator.  My own open source implementation provides no provision at
all for reusing a body hash across many signatures, and nobody ever
identified it as something that was sorely needed.

-MSK
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