On 4/27/10 10:34 AM, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jeff Macdonald [mailto:[email protected]]
>> Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2010 10:05 AM
>> To: McDowell, Brett
>> Cc: Murray S. Kucherawy; [email protected]
>> Subject: Re: [ietf-dkim] Wrong Discussion - was Why mailing lists
>> should strip DKIM signatures
>>
>>      
>>> That's interesting.  Let's make this concrete... I'll use myself as
>>>        
>> an example.
>>      
>>> X = me/PayPal.com
>>> Y = this list/[email protected]
>>> Z = Google's Gmail service [1]
>>>
>>> It is my assumption that someone subscribed to this list has a
>>>        
>> gmail.com account (or a Yahoo.com account [2]).  Therefore, my use case
>> is simple.  I would hope that those of you reading this from your Gmail
>> or Yahoo! accounts actually receive this message.  If Z breaks the
>> signature, you won't see this.
>>
>> how about Y breaking the signature? I see your message only because I
>> told gmail's filtering system to not put messages into the spam folder
>> for this list. Otherwise it would of gone into the spam folder.
>> Looking at the source of the message, I only see the list's DKIM
>> signature.
>>      
> Y breaking the signature isn't relevant (in this hypothesis).  Y also says 
> when it got the message from X, X's signature was intact.  That Y messed up 
> the signature, making Z unable to verify it directly, is not important; Z 
> trusts Y, so Z trusts Y's Authentication-Results: that says X's signature was 
> fine when it got to Y.
>    
While messages with intact DKIM signatures of financial institutions 
offers reasonable protection, acceptance of broken signatures validated 
by some third-party's authentication-results header would impose 
significant risk.    Any mailing list that does remove 
authentication-results headers would provide easy exploits of X.
>> Should the policy statements be ignored at that point?
>>      
> In this hypothesis, they could be.  Or, they could be applied.  If X's ADSP 
> says "all" or "discardable", and Z trusts Y, and Y claims X's message had a 
> valid signature, ADSP is satisfied.
>    
Acceptance of DKIM messages signed by Y is likely to be less strict than 
those by X, and likely to overlook broken signatures or lack of 
authentication-results headers.  However, an authorization scheme able 
to scale to any number of such lists using a single DNS transaction 
ensures X remains in control of the acceptance of their messages, 
without needing special private arrangements for making specific exceptions.

Since X has the most at stake, an authorization scheme would allow X to 
indicate which ADSP acceptance exceptions are desired.  The indication 
could be made on behalf of X through some designated vouching service, 
or directly by X when they they have audited the domains being used by 
them.  The ADSP record could include a flag to alert recipients of the 
existence of an added third-party authorization mechanism.

-Doug


_______________________________________________
NOTE WELL: This list operates according to 
http://mipassoc.org/dkim/ietf-list-rules.html

Reply via email to