Re: DMARC: perspectives from a listadmin of large open-source lists

"John Levine" <johnl@taugh.com> Wed, 16 April 2014 14:09 UTC

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Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2014 14:08:56 -0000
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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
To: ietf@ietf.org
Subject: Re: DMARC: perspectives from a listadmin of large open-source lists
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>..., you 
>could create a mechanism where the originator's site gets some sort of 
>cryptographic data from the mailing list site and include that in its 
>signed message, such that when the eventual recipient gets the message, 
>it can verify that it came from a mailing list site that the originator 
>explicitly sent the mail to.

The Sympa list manager implemented that in what appears to be a fully
RFC compliant way about a decade ago:

http://www.sympa.org/manual/x509

I don't get the impression it's very widely used.

Every discussion list security proposal I've ever seen includes
building a whitelist of trustworthy mailers, to avoid being spoofed by
bad guys that look like discussion lists but aren't.  Once you've done
that, I've never understood the threat model of anything more complex
than delivering the mail from the whitelisted sources, perhaps after a
cursory check to ensure that it looks like the mail you were
expecting.

R's,
John