Yahoo Mail Adds DomainKeys Authentication
Posted by malebolgia on 15 November 2004 - 15:55 · 8 comments & 2138 views
Yahoo Inc. is putting its e-mail authentication method into action. On Monday, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company will begin to support its DomainKeys cryptographic approach for Yahoo Mail, one of the largest Web-based e-mail services in the world. Yahoo's DomainKeys move will come as part of a series of enhancements to Yahoo Mail. The company will announce that it has increased the storage limit for free e-mail accounts from 100MB to 250MB and has raised the maximum attachment size for premium accounts from 10MB to 20MB.

By supporting DomainKeys on its own service, Yahoo hopes to jump-start broader adoption of its answer to stemming the rise of spam and phishing attacks through e-mail. Online attackers regularly send unsolicited e-mails and lure consumers into clicking malicious links or providing personal information by disguising their e-mail addresses with the domains of major consumer companies. "By implementing and deploying DomainKeys, we're showing that the cryptographic solution is not only the long-term answer but today's answer as well," said Miles Libbey, anti-spam product manager for Yahoo Mail.

News source: eWeek

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There are 8 additional comments
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(2 replies) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #1 Posted by Billprozac on 15 Nov 2004 - 16:40
Geez, could we all just agree on one method and have everyone adopt it!
Quote this comment #1.1 Posted by Jugalator on 15 Nov 2004 - 16:58
They're on the way -- two major mail providers now use this: Google and Yahoo.

This move was pretty expected since AFAIK, it's a technology from Yahoo that Google were just early adopters of.

This is great, I can only hope it becomes a kind of de facto standard.
We need some way to identify the true sender of mails, pretty obvious really.

I hope Microsoft is next with Hotmail.
Quote this comment #1.2 Posted by kitchenutensils on 15 Nov 2004 - 18:22
sorry but hotmail's about to adopt SenderID... not domainkeys; like the new dvd formats we'll have to see which one flattens out.
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #2 Posted by Matt500 on 15 Nov 2004 - 16:57
At least they are trying
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #3 Posted by NXTwoThou on 15 Nov 2004 - 18:31
Unfortunately, DomainKeys is going to leave a lot of people out in the cold. I know the mail server software that my company uses has already stated they aren't going to implement this as its a lot more work than the SPF/SenderID stuff(which, they still aren't going to implement, but, its not big deal if they don't, as without implementing it, it doesn't cripple us from sending or receiving mail(we just have to make a few entries in our dns entry to indicate that our ip addies are authorized to send for the domain)).

I think that's the part that bugs me about DomainKeys...its reliant on everyone changing software...
(2 replies) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #4 Posted by FireRabbit on 15 Nov 2004 - 19:48
I like this approach alot more than SPF/SenderID. Digital signatures are alot more reliable than any sort of IP-based verification, and much more flexible. For example, if someone (like me) runs a mail server from their home who's IP Address changes every so often they would not need to make any addional DNS changes (other than MX) to keep email working. Under SPF if I understand correctly, the TXT record stornig the SPF data would have to be updated for the new IP address.

And I don't know what kind of company thinks this is too much work to implement. Digital signing+verification is extremely simple with all the high-level APIs people have developed, especially in the .NET Framework (System.Security.Cryptography). Here's a C# implementation of DomainKeys that looks like fewer lines of code than the RFC .

http://mmmservices.web.cern.ch/mmmservices/Antispam/DomainKeysLibrary.aspx

I hope this gets implemented. I don't see anything that would prevent this and SPF from co-existing, but I do agree it would be nice if everyone agreed on a standard.
Quote this comment #4.1 Posted by NXTwoThou on 15 Nov 2004 - 22:22
I use Mercury Mail. So far, I get the impression that the general stance is that until there's a unified standard, its not worth coding every proposal that comes around.

DomainKeys has been mentioned a few times in the past few months in the mercury mailing list, some of the reasons people have against DomainKeys is that mailing lists and relaying through your ISP would no longer work. Some are also concerned about the processing penalty of generating the hash.

DomainKeys = Extra processing on everyones mail servers to generate the hash as mail goes out. Everyone has to support the standard, or it doesn't work. Last implementation I'd read showed that the headers are included as part of the hash, meaning that it can't be used for listservs or isp relaying.

SPF = Extra processing only on the machines receiving mail that want to filter based on SPF. Default for someone without a SPF record is that they don't care who uses that domain name for the from address. If someone wants to restrict access to their property(domain name) they simply tighten their SPF record.

As for SPF for your situation, when you make your MX change, make your TXT change, they are both stored in the same place... Or if you have an automatic method that currently changes your MX(and there is no support for changing TXT records), simply make your SPF record have a broad range of available addresses(x.x.x.???)

The one advantage of DomainKeys over SPF is that it protects against ip spoofing.
Quote this comment #4.2 Posted by FireRabbit on 16 Nov 2004 - 00:51
QUOTE

DomainKeys has been mentioned a few times in the past few months in the mercury mailing list, some of the reasons people have against DomainKeys is that mailing lists and relaying through your ISP would no longer work. Some are also concerned about the processing penalty of generating the hash.
The way I understand how mailinglists would work is your message is sent to the mailing list server. That transaction is signed and verified between your mail server and the mail server running the mailing list. Then, the mailing list mail server modifies the message (Reply-To, Subject, whatever else) and re-signs the message for each person's mail server on the mailing list. I don't really see any problem with this, assuming you trust the mailinglist server to not lie about who they recieved the message from (although this isnt any worse right now with no signatures).

QUOTE

DomainKeys = Extra processing on everyones mail servers to generate the hash as mail goes out. Everyone has to support the standard, or it doesn't work. Last implementation I'd read showed that the headers are included as part of the hash, meaning that it can't be used for listservs or isp relaying.
Yeah it is extra processing, but cryptography is pretty fast these days. It would be intresting to see if Yahoo! publishes any details about what sort of performance hit they saw on their mailservers after implementing this.

QUOTE

As for SPF for your situation, when you make your MX change, make your TXT change, they are both stored in the same place... Or if you have an automatic method that currently changes your MX(and there is no support for changing TXT records), simply make your SPF record have a broad range of available addresses(x.x.x.???)
Fair enough, I realized that was a bad example anyway.
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