On 21 Jun 2011, at 19:47, Douglas Otis wrote:

> On 6/17/11 1:05 PM, Rolf E. Sonneveld wrote:
>> Dear all,
>> 
>> after some off-list conversation with Dave he suggested I might want to
>> send this to the list. I apologize in advance if this message does not
>> apply to you. I also apologize if you get this message twice, when you
>> are subscribed to both ietf-dkim and the opendkim list.
> []
>> Regards,
>> /rolf
> 
> Hi Rolf,
> 
> The general goal of DKIM was to establish a domain relationship as a 
> trust basis for acceptance.  DKIM was also to allow incremental 
> deployment without requiring undefined additional filtering performed by 
> mail transfer or mail user agents.  When essential format checks are 
> skipped, this deficiency allows acceptance based upon DKIM's domain to 
> be potentially deceptive where its results may play an evil role that 
> cannot be repaired through the use of reputation.
> 
> Free email providers likely use DKIM to take advantage of their "too big 
> to block" volumes.  For these domains, their reputation is understood to 
> offer little assurance of their overall integrity.  By allowing a 
> pre-pended From header field to not affect the validity of a DKIM 
> signature according to the specification means the UNDERSTOOD source of 
> a message can NEVER be trusted.
> 
> Those that phish by taking advantage of this flaw are unlikely to affect 
> the acceptance of any exploited high volume domain.  DKIM could have 
> avoided the offering of false assurances by not ignoring illegal header 
> fields per RFC5322 and defining such messages as resulting in invalid 
> signatures.  At this time, it would be prudent to NOT recommend use of 
> DKIM due to this and a lack of required Fake A-label detection.

This seems like a completely bogus argument to me. You're saying that some 
domains can't be trusted, therefore none can be trusted. That's a logical 
fallacy. 

Sure, gmail.com can't be trusted because they'll sign even spoofed emails. So, 
my server won't be configured to give a pass to emails signed by gmail.com 
However, that doesn't mean that I can't be more lenient with respect to emails 
signed by, for example, subdomains of  .gov.uk, which might well be better 
managed.



-- 
Ian Eiloart
Postmaster, University of Sussex
+44 (0) 1273 87-3148


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

Reply via email to