RE: dmarc damage, was gmail users read on... [bozo subtopic]

["MH Michael Hammer (5304)" <[e-mail]>]

From: Wei Chuang [mailto:[e-mail]]
Sent: Friday, September 12, 2014 1:20 PM
To: MH Michael Hammer (5304)
Cc: Christian Huitema; Doug Barton; [e-mail]
Subject: Re: dmarc damage, was gmail users read on... [bozo subtopic]



On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 8:35 AM, MH Michael Hammer (5304) <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:


> -----Original Message-----
> From: ietf [mailto:[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>] On Behalf Of Christian Huitema
> Sent: Friday, September 12, 2014 1:34 AM
> To: Doug Barton; [e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>
> Subject: RE: dmarc damage, was gmail users read on... [bozo subtopic]
>
> >>>> I've collected all of the DMARC workarounds I know on the ASRG wiki:
> >>>>
> http://wiki.asrg.sp.am/wiki/Mitigating_DMARC_damage_to_third_party_
> >>>> mail
> >
> > Two responses to that, in no particular order of importance:
> >
> > 1. So you said, and yet the mere existence of that page out on the
> > intertubez has (oddly enough) not yet spurred the secretariat into action.
>
> The big change with DMARC is a deprecation of the Sender/From
> differentiation, effectively requiring that these two will be the same. It
> seems that big systems have voted that the differentiation causes more
> harm (spam, phish) than good (remailers).
>

This is actually not quite true. If the Sender and the From are in the same domain then there is no problem. It becomes an issue when the Sender and the From are different domains. DMARC does not care about the LHS of the email address (whether it is DKIM signing or SPF validation).

Agreed, but just wanted to add one thing- doesn't the details of the whether the sender has to align or not depends on whether SPF or DKIM is used as the authentication method?  (SPF w/DMARC will force the envelope sender to agree with from.)  Also I wanted to add to mix that there must be something by which to lookup the "sender's" DMARC policy, and the DMARC authors choose for various reasons the FROM domain by which the authentication methods will enforce "alignment" upon.

MH: Because (DMARC) alignment is required in either case it really isn't an issue whether SPF or DKIM is used for DMARC validation. Looking up the "sender's" policy is what PRA attempted in SenderID. I and others showed that it was rather trivial to game PRA to at least get a neutral status for a message. There is no reasonable way to establish that the Sender is truly representing the From, and that problematic when one is talking security/authorization models. There have been some discussions about how to implement an "authorization" for Sender but I haven't seen anything that makes sense to me.

The FROM domain was chosen for DMARC because it is what is generally used in the MUA (visible to the user). One could just as easily have argued for MailFrom as long as alignment between the two is required. Six of one half a dozen of the other.



> Of the responses listed, the one that clearly works is to ask forwarders to
> forward messages, what the wiki calls "message wrapping." It works in the
> sense that the mail system sees consistent headers that pass all verifications,
> and represent the actual action of the remailer while not relying on
> Sender/From differences.
>
> At that point, the issue is mostly with the UI. If my reader did recognize the
> "simple forwarding" case from "authorized remailers," then the message
> wrapping solution would be just fine. The good thing is that it is very much
> under my control

I also just wanted to bring another high level idea to the table- rather than discuss which work arounds to mandate (and all have problems), why not revisit the authentication methods?  In particular the current DKIM method, while very powerful in the security sense, is very restrictive.  Any changes to the signed message parts will cause the authentication to fail.   For example if a mailing lists modifies the subject or body even if done so in some sanctioned way, it will fail DKIM.  (And then since the message is resent, fail SPF)  At the broader IETF community level, perhaps it might be good to see about improving those RFC's?

MH: There is always the potential to consider other authentication methods and this has been discussed. Initially it is a complexity issue and real world experience showed that for most use cases (I'm waiting for someone to jump in and wag their finger at me about MLMs) the combination of aligned SPF and DKIM validation is extremely effective (although somewhat restrictive). I'm personally not against someone(s) doing some testing for other authentication methods to see what the outcomes would be - all you need is at least a participating sender and receiver. I know that there has been some discussion of DKIM signing individual MIME parts in addition to an overall signature so that one could see which parts were modified. This coupled with a signature by the list/forwarder might be an interesting approach. On the other hand it might represent too much complexity. Some folks advocate reputation of the forwarder as the solution. I'm not a big fan of reputation (For me it falls into the category of "What have you done to me lately" rather than "you've been a good actor for the last 5 years" - would you accept crap from a good domain gone bad just because they used to be good?)

For example there are some ideas about improving DKIM out there.  I've made a general but heavy-handed conceptual proposal early on in the DMARC WG, and I know there is another one by Murry Kucherawy (list-cannon) that IMO is a very good direction.  I think there's an opportunity of taking these approaches and simplifying them to make them palatable to the mailing-list operators.

MH: I'm agnostic on this. Some advocate changes to accommodate mailing-list operators - that's fine with me as long as there is still a decent security model. Others argue that mailing-list operators must change. That may or may not be true. The mail streams I'm responsible for are typically transactional and do not go through lists so while  have an opinion I've been hanging back from that "discussion". I'm gratified that there appears to be more serious discussion in this space though.

-Wei

Mike