On May 28, 2010, at 12:01 AM, Steve Atkins wrote:

> 
>  1. Do we want to reduce the DKIM broken signature rate or do we want to make 
> ADSP less vulnerable to it. Or both, I guess.

I think both of those objectives are of interest.

> 
>  2. If we want to reduce the DKIM broken signature rate, do we need to rework 
> DKIM at all

I don't think so.

> , or do we need to make operational recommendations to the generator and 
> signer of the mail

yes

> , or do we need to provide operational advice to forwarders and mailing list 
> managers

yes

> . For any of those we need to balance the improvement against the reduction 
> in deployment and reduction in correct deployment the increased complexity 
> will cause. The history of SPF-all and SRS is likely relevant there.
> 

Why is guidance for how to use something that already exist make things more 
complex?  It should dramatically reduce complexity through clear 
recommendations.

Re-writing DKIM would be a problem, and I for one am not in favor of that as I 
agree with Steve that it will have a negative impact on deployments, but surely 
implementation guidance would only have a positive impact on deployments.

>  3. If we want to make ADSP less vulnerable to it, this basically means 
> reworking ADSP such that it says that receivers should accept unsigned mail 
> in some cases - the various suggestions about accepting unsigned mail from 
> "trusted" mailing lists or forwarders. This is bound to open up a bunch of 
> theoretical security issues, and probably some real ones.

I do not believe that is our only option.  We can extend ADSP to provide a few 
new options over "all" and "discardable" that meet current use cases.  
Otherwise we could publish guidance to address expected use but I assume that 
guidance will leave it to the deployer to decide who and why they "trust" 
certain streams and/or policy assertions.

> 
>  3a.  If we go in that direction we're looking at making some fairly tricky 
> security related decisions. We'd need a proper analysis of the security risks 
> and operational benefits, which would require us to be more honest than we 
> have been in the past about what the end goals are, and how some of the more 
> obvious attack trees would affect those goals.
> 
Maybe you are contemplating a different part of the elephant but I don't see 
what you are getting at with this line of rhetoric.

> Any of those changes - i.e. doing anything other than accepting the seriously 
> broken behaviour and just documenting it - would require buy-in from the 
> chairs and other participants, and likely a charter clarification.

I would not be surprised if we need a charter clarification to tackle adding 
options to ADSP, but aren't we already chartered to provide BCP guidance for 
the technologies that have come out of this WG?

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