Earl Hood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> On October 29, 2005 at 06:44, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>
>> S 5:
>>    One of the most fundamental bad acts being attempted is the delivery
>>    of messages which are not authorized by the alleged originating
>>    domain.  As described above, these messages might merely be unwanted
>>    by the recipient, or might be part of a confidence scheme or a
>>    delivery vector for malware.
>> 
>> This seems to me to be too concrete. At a meta-level, the bad
>> act being attempted is the delivery of messages which the receiver
>> doesn't want to see (see Section 2 again).
>
> Only the receiver knows what they want and do not want to see.
>
> The bad act is the deliberate deception by the sender upon the
> recipient to avoid accountability and/or obtain a false sense of
> trust in order to entice the recipient to perform actions based on
> that false trust.
>
> A spam message does not mean that any identities are being spoofed.

Exactly. But forgery is not a significant problem outside of the
spam/phishing context. And outside that context it's arguable that
it would be better dealt with with something like S/MIME.


>> But doesn't this effectively say "DKIM (or any sender signing scheme)
>> doesn't work against attacks that attempt to involve impersonating
>> a specific source address"? What class of specific impersonation
>> attacks does this technology actually work against in practice?
>
> "Exact" domain spoofing.  I.e. There is a desire to at least deal
> with cases to avoid unauthorized use of an exact domain.  Look-alike
> attacks are a much more difficult problem since human factors are
> more involved.

Right, but the important question is whether the benefit of
reducing exact domain spoofing is of much value.

-Ekr



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