[ietf-dkim] Collection of use cases for SSP requirements

Dave Crocker dhc at dcrocker.net
Fri Nov 10 07:49:38 PST 2006



Charles Lindsey wrote:
> On Thu, 09 Nov 2006 15:40:37 -0000, Dave Crocker <dhc at dcrocker.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>> As soon as banks start signing their messages and there are credible 
>> whitelists for their domain names, doesn't this end the ability for 
>> phishers to use those domain names in the rfc2822.From field?
> 
> I fail to see how "credible whilelists" are going to work. You cannot 
> expect all the millions of honest internet users to get into such 

DKIM is about domain names, not users.  This means "organizations" and not 
"users".  I do not see why we cannot expect organizations to get on whitelists.


> whitelists. Rather, it seems that what is suggested is that there will 
> exists whitelists of "respectable banks".

There will probably be many different whitelists.  Some will be for specific 
categories of senders, and others will be broader.  Note that the non-Internet 
world already has lots of whitelists and we have learned how to deal with them. 
   (For example, Michelin for restaurants.)  Some are better than others... We 
develop a means of ranking them.


> But how do you tell, automatically, that a message is from a "bank", and 
> therefore ought to be ignored if it is not whitelisted? 

Please review John Levine's note of today.


> But you still have the problem of educating users to expect such 
> texts/headers, and educating them to do that is just as hard as 
> educating them to recognise present-day phishes 

Teaching users to recognize a symbol on the screen that means "safe" is not as 
difficult as teaching them to recognize the various forms of deception used by 
phishers.  (Again, see John Levine's note.)

d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net



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