Yahoo DomainKeys draft specification

Yahoo publishes its DomainKeys specification.
FAQ at Yahoo! Anti-Spam Resource Center – DomainKeys.

I must say that I share Justin Mason’s distrust and disdain for software patents.
What the heck is patentable among these ideas anyway? They seem like obvious applications of digital signatures and DNS publication.
The most generous interpretation is that these might be defensive patents, and that for all intents, the IETF-required license is good enough.

Is this or SPF
likely to take the world by storm?
Either one permits senders to publish records that permit receivers to make some authentication judgments.

Well, deployment by senders is a bit more work (sign those messages) for DK than for SPF. But SPF breaks what has been considered normal forwarding behavior, in a way that the sender has no control over except by saying “put up with it” or by turning off SPF.

Deployment by receivers has no particular downside for either scheme — you’re basically implementing sender-requested filtering, and who can complain about that?

Of course, initially, rather than trying to subvert either scheme, spammers will avoid both. Is it possible that the world will shift so much that just being a non-DK domain will count against the sender? I do think it’s possible. At which point, yes, spammers adopt the technology but subvert it with throwaway domains and proxy zombies with access to signing servers.
You can’t avoid reputation systems in the end,
trusted third parties, (some even having good incentives to rate
accurately and respond quickly), blacklists, etc.

One Comment

  1. Sigh, yes.
    MTAs can and do prepend (e.g. Received headers) and append (e.g. almost everything else). DK could define a robust encapsulation method — but isn’t just reinventing S/MIME? Or it could select a subset of headers to include (e.g. only From and Subject). Although proposed standard RFC2476 does allow leeway in changing From, having this only occur for malformed From wouldn’t be too bad.

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