Re: [dmarc-ietf] ARC questions

Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com> Thu, 26 November 2020 00:52 UTC

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To: "Murray S. Kucherawy" <superuser@gmail.com>
Cc: Douglas Foster <dougfoster.emailstandards@gmail.com>, IETF DMARC WG <dmarc@ietf.org>
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From: Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com>
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Subject: Re: [dmarc-ietf] ARC questions
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On 11/25/20 4:14 PM, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 11:03 AM Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com 
> <mailto:mike@mtcc.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     That's been known for over 15 years. I'm still trying to
>     understand the assertion that DKIM signatures are a "bad fit". I
>     just looked at a random message off of this thread and they look
>     identical except for the i= field. another field could trivially
>     be added to DKIM and auth-res -- since unknown fields are supposed
>     to be ignored -- if this binding property is absolutely needed,
>     which I remain unconvinced by as well.
>
> I'm not sure about "bad fit".  The original plan was to have an 
> Authentication-Results (AR) clone called 
> Original-Authentication-Results (OAR) which was specifically the AR 
> content generated at the first non-submission MTA. There was some 
> friction (mostly from me, as I recall) about having two header fields 
> with identical syntax and nearly identical semantics.  There was 
> further complication in the fact that one ADMD could apply multiple 
> ARs on a single message (for multiple methods, or multiple instances 
> of the same method, or a combination of those), or they could be 
> reordered, etc.  To make it more resilient, things like instance 
> numbers were added.  The work was eventually generalized to be a 
> "chain of custody" sort of model, and in doing that I think the 
> decision was made to make a new name to ensure ARC and DKIM would be 
> processed differently.


But what about DKIM? And why do they need to be processed differently? 
When I first saw this, I looked at the ARC-Signature which looks 
identical to a DKIM signature (i didn't notice the i= at the time), and 
am like what is this? The i= counter could be trivially be grafted onto 
DKIM if it were needed, which I'm still sort of dubious (though it is a 
nice to have feature, I admit). That way you only need a single DKIM 
signature with the OAR's signed. As far as I can tell, that would fall 
back gracefully for non-implementing DKIM verifiers. Do you disagree?

>
>>     If you ask me, part of the experiment should be able to show use
>>     cases that DKIM + auth-res (or maybe old-auth-res if needed)
>>     CANNOT address that ARC can, and most especially what percentage
>>     of email traffic we're actually talking here. As far as I can see
>>     ARC doesn't bring anything especially new for the mailing list
>>     kind of use cases since it really easy to see who the
>>     intermediary was that broke the signature. I have been told there
>>     are some vague other kinds of use cases but is unclear whether
>>     those use cases actually happen before or after the message
>>     arrives at the front door of the final receiving domain. Yes, i
>>     read section 7, but it doesn't tell me why this can't be handled
>>     with current technology.
>
> Obviously it's too late to include this in RFC 8617, but those would 
> indeed be interesting data to have.


Yeah, quantifying the problems kinda seems like the first order of 
business if you ask me. I mean, how many of these scenarios are in 
reality goofy self-inflicted wounds? I can't say but there seems to be a 
lot more "this can happen" than "this is how often this happens" from 
what I've see thus far on this thread.

>
> When you say "easy to see", do you mean for software or for humans?


Software. Only software can pry apart that ball of header spaghetti. But 
I think with the simple a mailing list it is pretty easy to determine, 
which now that I think about it I actually did back in the day when I 
was experimenting with recovering mailing list modifications. It didn't 
occur to me that that was supposed to be hard.


>     It seems to me that the lynchpin is whether I trust the domain
>     that broke the signature and resigned. That's either a previously
>     solved or unsolved problem depending on your perspective. If I
>     trust the intermediary domain to not send me spam via reputation,
>     I forward it along to be delivered and ignore the DMARC record.
>     Why do I care whether it originally validated from the sending
>     domain or not? If you ask me, that's the intermediary domain's
>     problem since they have an incentive to keep their reputation and
>     not send spam through.
>
> Suppose you're sending to a list that I'm on, I enforce DMARC, I trust 
> that MLM not to send spam via reputation, you have a good reputation, 
> and you publish a DMARC "reject" policy.  That means if a bad actor 
> sends a message to the list as you but doesn't sign it at all, I'll 
> still accept it because I trust that MLM even though according to your 
> policy request, I should bounce it.  ARC provides the missing data I 
> need to enforce your request.

Sure, but the easier answer: to use my mailing list, you must have 
either DKIM, SPF or both. Sounds like a good way to not be essentially 
an open relay. Don't mailing lists have those sorts of policies these 
days? I would say that ones that don't probably shouldn't have good 
reputations since they are, in effect... open relays.

Mike

PS: it's been, what, 15 years since our interop, partner? :)