Additional lookups (was Re: [ietf-dkim] Re: 1368 straw-poll)

[Bill.Oxley at cox.com]

+1

Bill Oxley
Messaging Engineer
Cox Communications
404-847-6397

-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-dkim-bounces at mipassoc.org
[mailto:ietf-dkim-bounces at mipassoc.org] On Behalf Of Wietse Venema
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 8:44 AM
To: Charles Lindsey
Cc: DKIM
Subject: Re: Additional lookups (was Re: [ietf-dkim] Re: 1368
straw-poll)

Charles Lindsey:
> On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 13:21:55 -0000, Hector Santos
<hsantos at santronics.com>  
> wrote:
> >
> > There are three basic outcomes with a message:
> >
> >     VALID SIGNATURE
> >     INVALID SIGNATURE
> >     NO SIGNATURE
> 
> No, there are four basic outcomes with a message. You omitted
> 
>        UNVERIFIABLE SIGNATURE
> 
> which just happens to be the one that this thread is all about.

On a friendly internet with only cooperating parties, this might
make sense.  But the world has changed. With today's internet it
would be a fundamental mistake to make more distinctions than:

    the signature was verified
    other

If the verifier gives different treatments to different types of
"other", then the bad guys will exploit the verifier's behavior.

The solution to the problem is not to complicate the protocol, but
to avoid the mistake of giving different treatments to different
types of "other".

	Wietse
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