Bye Bye Spam and Phishing with DKIM?

ppadala writes "While research from PEW Internet (PDF) shows that few users really are bothered by spam, IETF is supporting a public key cryptographic based e-mail authentication mechanism called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Signatures . The new spec is supposed to help in fighting both spam and fraud. From Ars Technica: 'DKIM's precursor, DomainKeys, was originally developed by Yahoo. The specifications for DKIM were then extended by an informal group of IT organizations that included companies like Yahoo, Cisco, EarthLink, Microsoft, and VeriSign, among others. It was first submitted by the group to the IETF in mid-2005, but only recently published by the IETF. The spec is still to be incorporated into a more formal draft and submitted for approval, however.'"

Comments

Here we go again...

[ZeldorBlat]

This article advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

It's only a server validiation solution

[jimpop]

It's only a server validiation solution. DKIM won't stop spam. DKIM will only help validate the identity of the server that is sending you email. Right now I get lots of spam from legitimate Yahoo, Mail.com, and Hotmail servers. DKIM isn't going to stop that it's only going to reinforce what I already know.

Re:It's only a server validiation solution

[MightyMartian]

A quick read of the RFC tells me that this is simply a more computationally-intensive variant of SPF. It still requires rewriting the headers for forwarding, will likely not have the degree of adoption so that anyone in charge of a mail system actually feels confident enough to use it as another weighting factor for testing spam, and still leaves those sitting behind systems that still force users with outside email addresses to use their mail servers. The mere fact that any such system (SPF, DomainKeys or whatever) has to essentially remain completely compatible with older SMTP-based systems means that it really won't solve the problem. The underlying SMTP relay system has problems, and Domain Keys and SPF are just kludgy solutions that really are limited in what exactly they can solve.

Re:Ah, yes the solution of the week

[DMNT]

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Not a bad try, though. Usually way more crosses on the form.

few users

[Anonymous Coward]

spam bothers few users

Dunno about anyone else, but as the admin for our company, I get more complaints about spam than anything other single item I can think of...

Re:few users

[WrongSizeGlass]

Ditto.
The ISP of one of my clients just turned on 'greylisting' and their mail volume dropped 71%, knocking their spam % down to 11% of their new volume.

They would rather spend the budget on stopping spam rather than upgrading their servers. It's that big of a problem.

DKIM will help (until fake 'certificates' show up) but it won't solve the problem. Only flame-throwers, and lots of them, will fix this once and for all.

yahoo press release

[Ramses0]

http://yodel.yahoo.com/2007/05/22/one-small-step-f or-email-one-giant-leap-for-internet-safety/

It also has some nice background information on DKIM.

--Robert

Re:Prefer SPF

[MightyMartian]

SPF is protecting 8 million domains

I think the proper phrase is "SPF has cluttered up the TXT field of 8 million domain records, most of them with NEUTRAL because no one has the balls to actually let this creature roam the Internet without a heavy chain".

I believed in SPF about three years ago, but it became very clear that it (and Sender ID too) wouldn't do a damn thing, and Domain Keys seems no different.

Sooooo close... but not going to work.

[NerveGas]

    My initial thought was "Terrific. This really has the potential to eliminate spam." Then I got to looking into the RFC... standard private/public key exchange. But, it allows for individual MUAs to posess the private key, such that they can perform the signature.

    This puts the entire burden of security in the scheme upon the MUA. So any time a machine is infected with the spam-virus of the day, that private key will be sent off to the spammers, who will send out floods of seemingly legitimately-signed email. Instead of just selling valid email addresses to other spammers, they'll sell addresses and domain keys.

    Furthermore, from an administrative perspective, that means that each time one of your user's machines is hacked and the private key compromised, you have to change your public/private keypair, including updating the MUA on *all* of your sender's machines.

    Forcing signing upon the MTAs eliminates much of that work (and hopefully the security exposure), but forces inconvenience on a good number of users. It's a tradeoff I'd be willing to make, but the RFC doesn't seem willing to do so.

Re:Sooooo close... but not going to work.

[MightyMartian]

You've come close to what I arrived at in the last few months of my job working for an ISP, that all these kludgy attempts to beef up SMTP would always be fatally flawed unless we (and by that I mean Joe Average and admins) was prepared for inconveniences. That means putting an end to straight-out forwarding, because that pretty much busts everything without the major overhead of rewriting the headers. It means locking down the servers themselves and not expecting some "good neighbor" protocol to somehow magically take care of the problem. As someone else has pointed out, how is DomainKeys any different than PGP signing, which has been around for two decades now. Even if we went to DomainKeys or PGP, it still wouldn't stop all those zombies out there from happily sending signed spam. It means that distributed dictionary attacks would have to come in with a legitimate address from the source network, but I doubt the spammers are going to give a damn about that.

The problem with spam is that it isn't just an email problem. If it was, then we'd all have had this beat a long time ago.

Re:Prefer SPF

[MightyMartian]

The problem with putting your eggs in a basket is that it you're putting a helluva lot of trust in a system which is nothing more than a good neighbor policy. A lot of guys I know simply put in SPF records that set them to neutral, because they were ISPs who had clients who were sending from various restrictive networks that blocked them (yes I know, switching ports, SMTP auth and all that ought to do the trick, but we're in the real world here). SPF wasn't perfect, and forwarding was a major failure that was only solved by envelope-rewriting.

I adopted SPF on the domains I ran early on too, not because I thought it would do a damn thing, but because I didn't want to get screwed by some anal-retentive at RoadRunner who decided to start blocking everything that didn't come from an SPF-record holding domain.

SPF, SenderID and DomainKeys probably could have a good deal more success if they were more widely adopted, but they still wouldn't stop some of the big sources of spam. Even with that in place, the mail system is still vulnerable. We were getting such a high volume of distributed dictionary attacks at the place I worked at that we literally had to hide our mail server behind some Postfix proxies which did nothing more than reject hundrds of thousands (and some days millions) of individual attacks per day.

Re:Will my ISP Quit Blocking Port 25, Finally?

[killjoe]

Here is what I would like.

If an IP address makes more then X connections to my SMTP port at the same time it gets routed to a teergrube.
If an IP address attempts to send email to Y number of invalid users it gets routed to a teergrube.
If an IP address sends me Z number of spam as marked by spamassassin it gets routed to a teergrube.
If an IP address is on the RBL of my choice it gets routed to a teergrube.

And of course a teergrube which can handle a few hundred simultaneous connections and keep them busy for hours.

If we all had all this then at least we could make a dent in the amount of spam going out.

Users are not bothered by spam?

[Gary W. Longsine]

I find it difficult to believe that most users are not bothered by spam. As far as I can tell, legitimate email use has been falling dramatically for the past couple years, as people flee the effects of spam, switching to SMS and IM (Jabber, AIM, etc.) Email use within a single corporation remains popular, but home users seem to be abandoning email outright. Some people have given up ordinary email and only use locked-down email inside of social network sites. Spam seems to be killing email. If that doesn't bother people, it's only because they fled email for IM, SMS, and Myspace. If spam follows them, and they have nowhere else to run, they're going to become pretty irate.