Re: [dmarc-ietf] A policy for direct mail flows only, was ARC questions

[Brandon Long <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Dec 2, 2020 at 3:11 AM Alessandro Vesely <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Wed 02/Dec/2020 03:14:46 +0100 Brandon Long wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 1, 2020 at 2:37 AM Alessandro Vesely <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >> On Tue 01/Dec/2020 05:56:46 +0100 Brandon Long wrote:
> >>> On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 12:59 AM Alessandro Vesely <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
> >>>> On 25/11/2020 20:16, Michael Thomas wrote:
> >>>>> On 11/25/20 11:11 AM, Alessandro Vesely wrote:
> >>>>>> On 25/11/2020 19:24, Jesse Thompson wrote:
> >>>>>>> On 11/25/20 11:30 AM, Alessandro Vesely wrote:
> >>>>>>>> Without resorting to ARC, it is still possible to validate author
> >>>>>>>> domain's signatures directly if the MLM just adds a subject tag
> >>>>>>>> and a footer>>>>>
> >>>>>>> I agree that ARC isn't really needed to do this (trust the last hop
> >>>>>>> from the MLM and determine the original authenticity from the MLM's
> >>>>>>> perspective)>>>>
> >>>>>> I didn't mean to trust the MLM.  I meant remove the subject tag and
> >>>>>> the footer, then the original DKIM signature verifies.  See:
> >>>>>> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-vesely-dmarc-mlm-transform/
> >>>>>
> >>>>> When I was at Cisco, with l= and some subject line heuristics I
> could get
> >>>>> probably like 90+% verification rate across the entire company, a
> company that
> >>>>> uses external mailing lists a lot. Definitely not 100% though.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> DKIM itself is not 100%.  You always have lines beginning with "From
> " or
> >>>> occasional autoconversions.
> >>>>
> >>>> l= doesn't cover multipart/alternative nor Content-Transfer-Encoding:
> >>>> base64. In addition, the DKIM spec discourages its usage and suggests
> >>>> that "Assessors might wish to ignore signatures that use the tag.">>
> >>>
> >>> Right, some of the other dkim-light or diff concepts we discussed
> would be
> >>> better than using l=
> >>>
> >>> We again got hung up on the 100% solution, though... something that
> handled
> >>> subject-prefix and footer in a transport agnostic way might have
> worked.
> >>
> >> I'm not clear about the meaning of "100%".  If an author domain puts no
> >> DKIM signatures, there is no way to verify them.  Hence, some
> compliance of
> >> the author domain has to be required.
> >>
> >> The same holds for conditional signatures.
> >>
> >> The same holds for MLM transformations.
> >>
> >
> > Yes, by 100% I meant of messages that were already authenticated and
> > therefore should continue to be authenticated through the relay.
>
> That's ARC.  If a message lacks DKIM and was SPF-authenticated, there's no
> way
> it can continue to be authenticated through a relay.
>
> OTOH, mailing lists and relays are two different beasts.  For one thing,
> it is
> very unusual for a mailing list to send to another mailing list.  Thus, we
> can
> safely specify a non-stackable authentication method.
>

mailing list to mailing list mail is very common in GSuite, but maybe we're
a special
case.  Part of that was that aliases were moved to the mailing list infra
(which is definitely
more of an "our problem" than everyone), but we also see common usage where
companies make groups matching their hierarchy (the all company group goes
to
all department groups which go to all local groups etc).  We also see some
where
announce groups mix contrib groups, etc.  Especially since we also use the
same
groups as ACL groups for GSuite and Google Cloud, so hierarchical groups
are very
common.

(there was a recent common where someone said who needs an org chart when we
have email, showing the list of footers for all of the org level mailing
lists the message
went to to get to them)

(one construction of hierarchical announce lists that was not well
considered did result
in every person on the combined list getting 9000 copies of messages to the
list, so
flattening lists is sometimes much preferred)

Which isn't to say we couldn't work around it or do the work to flatten the
lists, though
it increases the complexity of the product (can you unsubscribe from the
top level list
but not a sub list?)

Brandon