[Leaplist] DKIM good or bad for people and Linux

[John Simpson]

On 2008-02-11, at 1119, Sun State Martial Arts wrote:
>
> Powerful new antiphishing weapon DKIM emerges
> ...
> There's a new gun in town, and some of the Internet's most powerful  
> companies -- including Yahoo <http://www.networkworld.com/news/financial/yahoo.html 
> >, Google <http://www.networkworld.com/news/financial/google.html>,  
> PayPal <http://www.paypal.com> and AOL <http://www.aol.com> -- are  
> brandishing it in the ongoing battle against e-mail fraud.
> ...
> So the question is will something like this help the community at  
> large or be more of a big guy v little guy type solution?

old news. this was originally known as "domainkeys".

the idea is this: each domain has one or more public keys, which are  
shared with the world using DNS records. when a message is sent from a  
domain which has a key, through a server which is legitimately allowed  
to originate mail for that domain, that server adds a header to the  
message which contains a cryptographic signature of the message  
itself. then, anybody who has the domain's public key (i.e. anybody  
who can do DNS queries) can verify that signature, which proves that  
(1) the sender IS authorized to send messages from that domain, and  
(2) the message itself hasn't been changed in transit.

personally, i think it's a good idea. the biggest problem is that only  
a limited number of domains have created keys and are signing  
messages, and even fewer of them are verifying the signatures on  
incoming messages. (at the moment, my own server doesn't do either  
one- one of my "when i get some free time" projects is to add  
domainkeys support.)

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| John M. Simpson  --  KG4ZOW  --  Programmer At Large |
| http://www.jms1.net/                 <jms1 at jms1.net> |
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|   Hope for America  --  http://www.ronpaul2008.com/  |
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