[Fwd: Re: [ILUG] opinions on DKIM]

[Jeroen Massar]

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Justin Mason wrote:
> paul at clubi.ie writes:
>> - why on earth, if the goal is to authenticate emails from online
>>    entities (e.g. PayPal, AOL, Amazon, etc.) to /their customers/,
>>    do we need to invent /any/ technology at all?
>>
>>    - the problems could be fixed just easily by using *EXISTING* RFCs
>>    - we already have the technology to sign emails...
>>    - the DKIM "dont fail bad signatures" goal actually runs /counter/
>>      to this, the only possible credible use for DKIM..
> 
> Can you name a single online store that sends transactional mail signed
> with PGP or S-MIME?  Or a cron job on your machines?
> 
> PGP/S-MIME signatures are nice for small-scale, person-to-person,
> pre-arranged encryption/signing.  However, they've thoroughly failed in
> deployment for non-person-to-person email (e.g. transactional or
> automated), which constitutes a pretty important subset of SMTP use.

OpenPGP signed mail definitely works in an automated fashion. It is what
we and a lot of ISP's use for updating RIPE database entries, and yes
that goes from cron, I am really not going to be **** to update those
manually, let the robot handle that. Guess why SixXS has the record
number of inet6num's in the RIPE db, indeed that is not because I or Pim
manually typed them in there :)

This thus proves that: there are automated signers + automated verifiers.

For the latter I have a PHP based tool which can do it for you (soon to
be deployed for forum at sixxs.net in case folks are wondering :)

As mentioned, the big issue with PGP signing is the key distribution
(mostly solved by pka-address), that every user needs it and lastly that
some mailinglists seem to strip it when not using inline-signing, which
breaks other things ;)

Greets,
 Jeroen
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