Message Authentication Signature Standards BOF (mass)

Message Authentication Signature Standards BOF (mass)

Thursday, August 5 at 0930-1130
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CHAIRS: Nathaniel Borenstein <[email protected]>
Jim Fenton <[email protected]>

AGENDA:
Introductions (10 min)
Proposed WG goals/non-goals (15 min)
Taxonomy and status of signing proposals: (15 min each)
Identified Internet Mail
DomainKeys
E-mail Postmarks
Entity-to-entity S/MIME
Proposed WG Deliverables/Schedule (15 min)
Discussion /Summary (15 min)

DESCRIPTION:

Several proposals have recently been published for the signing of messages, primarily email messages, to deter source address spoofing. These include:
DomainKeys, draft-delany-domainkeys-base-00.txt
Identified Internet Mail, draft-fenton-identified-mail-00.txt
E-mail Postmarks, http://www.lessspam.org/EmailPostmarks.pdf

While the prevention of message spoofing is also a goal of the MARID working group, cryptographic approaches to this problem are explicitly outside the charter of MARID. Nevertheless, many that are familiar with the address-based authorization approaches MARID is considering consider them to be an interim step until message signing is deployed, or as a complementary technology to be used along with message signing.

This BOF (and IETF Working Group formation, if there is sufficient interest) will focus on standards for message signing, including:
- Signature format (syntax) and binding to message source address
- Key management procedures
- Selection of message content to be signed (headers, etc.)
- Mechanisms for minimizing breakage as messages pass through the mail system
- Operation of message signing in concert with address-based authorization