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With the Online Trust Alliance Town Hall Meeting and Email Authentication Roundtable next week as well as the RSA Conference, I decided to pause and think about where we are and where we might be headed with regard to email authentication. Over the years, many of us have collectively worked to provide a framework for authenticating email...
Last September the Virginia Supreme Court issued a surprise ruling that reversed its previous decision and threw out the state’s anti-spam law on First Amendment grounds. The Commonwealth made a last ditch appeal to the US Supreme Court, which I predicted they’d be unlikely to accept. I guessed right...
Throughout this series of articles we've been talking about DKIM, and what a valid DKIM signature actually means. .. What this means for senders (of any type) is that with DKIM, you’re protected. On the internet, your domain name is a statement of your brand identity – so by signing messages with DKIM, you can finally, irrevocably tie those messages to your brand.
This article is the first in an occasional series on DKIM/ADSP edge cases that may not be generally recognized or understood. Many people advocate DKIM/ADSP adoption without fully recognizing potential implementation and operational issues. The fact is that the email messaging environment is fraught with opportunities for poor outcomes because of common practices that need to be considered or poorly understood implementations that are not considered...
Once you've determined that you can trust the signer of a message, as we discussed in part 3, it's easy to extrapolate that various portions of the message are equally trustworthy. For example, when there's a valid DKIM signature, we might assume that the From: header isn't spoofed. But in reality, DKIM only tells us two basic things...
The Conficker worm will be active again on April 1st, according to an analysis of its most recent variant, Conficker.C, by the net security firm CA. This malicious piece of software, also known as Downup, Downadup and Kido, spreads among computers running most variants of the Windows operating system and turns them into nodes on a multi-million member ‘botnet’ of zombie computers that can be controlled remotely by the worm’s as yet unidentified authors.
It's coming up on two years since the DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) standard was published. While we're seeing a certain amount of signed mail from Google, Paypal, and ESPs, there's still a long way to go. How hard is it to sign your mail with DKIM? The major hurdle might seem to be getting mail software that can sign outgoing mail.
Last year, MAAWG published a white paper titled Trust in Email Begins with Authentication [PDF], which explains that authentication (DKIM) is “[a] safe means of identifying a participant-such as an author or an operator of an email service” while reputation is a “means of assessing their trustworthiness.”
In part 1, we explained that the DKIM "d=" value identifies the domain name which signed the message, which may be a different domain name from the author of the message. Tying the signing and author domains together will require an additional standard: Author Domain Signing Practices (ADSP). In IETF parlance, the "author domain" is the domain name in the From: header, so ADSP is a way for the author domain to publish a statement specifying whether any other domain name should ever sign a message purporting to be From: that author domain...
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is the leading email authentication technology, supported by major ISPs including Google, AOL, and Yahoo! (who invented its predecessor), popular mail server software like Sendmail, and many of the best minds in email technology. But if you peruse the archives of the IETF DKIM mailing list, or start up a conversation at MAAWG, it might appear that there's still a lot of disagreement about what a DKIM signature actually means.
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