Re: Why are mail servers not also key servers?

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 03:23:42PM +0000, Viktor Dukhovni wrote:
> This was all covered in the discussion of draft-moore-email-addrquery.
> (Perhaps on the UTA rather than DANE list? I don't recall)
> 
> My take at the time was (and remains) that queries for the recipient's
> public key can be tunneled through the user's MSA, thereby avoiding
> the issue of inability to reach port 25 from consumer end-device
> IP space.  That discussion unfortunately appears to have worn-out
> the draft author.  
> 
> I still think that draft is worth pursuing, if one is willing to
> not set the bar too high.  The reason we have so little security
> is sometimes (often?) because we're unwilling to accept less than
> "perfect" security.  It is not unreasonable to trust the MSA to be
> a trusted proxy for remote keys.  After all, in that model the same
> MSA/MTA operator is trusted to vend your keys to others.

+1

The link to DNSSEC could be this:

 - the client should learn via DNSSEC that the user's MSA supports this
   feature, 

and

 - the user's MSA should learn via DNSSEC that the target domain (and
   any MTAs on the way there) supports this feature.

Nico
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