Martin Schulte writes:

 > in the archives of the developer mailing list I read that there
 > have been efforts to implement the Authenticated Received Chain
 > (ARC) Protocol in Mailman.

Then that's where you should be asking about it.  It hasn't been
mentioned on this list because it's not ready for prime time, and may
never be (see below).

That said, it's a GSoC project.  The protocol implementation is
complete, and Mailman integration is well along, but it has not yet
been tested against other implementations for interoperability.  This
is for Mailman 3 only.  Most of the code is quite independent of
Mailman, so could probably be installed as a Handler in Mailman 2, but
we have made no effort in that direction, and probably won't.

However, this implementation is really just a proof of concept.  You
not want to be implementing this protocol in Mailman if you can
possibly avoid it.  You want to be doing it in your MTA because
Mailman can't validate SPF (it will always be receiving mail from
localhost, not the remote boundary system).

Worse, it requires rather high privileges on the host system.  You
need access to the DNS to provide public keys to verify the signatures
you add, and to the private keys to add those signatures.  These are
the same keys used for DKIM signatures, which means Mailman can be
used to impersonate any user of that system.  As far as I know, taking
over Mailman to that extent is pretty much as difficult as taking over
the MTA itself, but why double the attack surface?

Note that this is *different* from the argument against doing spam-
checking in Mailman.  Spam-checking is Mailman is inefficient and less
friendly to the mail system compared to doing it in the MTA, but the
risks involved are just those of doing a poor job of spam-checking
(including backscatter, etc).  This facility gives new powers to the
successful attacker.

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