On 9/4/10 10:04 AM, MH Michael Hammer (5304) wrote:
>  Using a subdomain presents other issues but ones which I personally
>  believe are likely more controllable.

Disagree.  There is no ADSP policy currently defined able to provide the 
protections being sought without forgoing use of mailing-lists for the 
entire domain down.

>  The DKIM enforcement policies you refer to are as I understand self
>  imposed ones. We had the "tree walking" discussion during both DKIM
>  and ADSP development and the decision was to have each subdomain
>  publish it's own records.

The TPA-Label draft avoids this issue by having either an MX or ADSP 
record override a domain-wide marking by ADSP of being the target of 
phishing attacks.  It is logical to assume such attacks will utilize 
sub-domains, where it is not possible to publish ADSP at each domain.  
Targeted domains marked with discardable might be retained as a wildcard 
within a local cache or in filtering rules to avoid walking down to the 
TLD.

>  Paypal would have to deal with those parties it has made private
>  arrangements with but that is the nature of changes that impact such
>  arrangements. This is a much more controllable (if potentially time
>  consuming) situation than dealing with the universe of endusers.
>
>  The other issue is the fact that an element of risk is created
>  because of the MLM issues related to breaking signatures. If it
>  weren't for the MLM issue and possibly recipient use of vanity domain
>  forwarding, it isn't clear how much meaningful signature breakage
>  would occur for outbound Paypal mail regardless of domain.

When a discardable assertion is used, message loss becomes nearly 
impossible to assess.

>  One question that comes to mind is whether the issue is centered on
>  mailing lists or if there are broader issues. If it is centered on
>  mailing lists, how broad is the need for Paypal employees to send
>  mail through lists in furtherance of business needs (vs personal
>  participation using a corporate account because it is convenient).
>  Spending a little time analyzing this may provide some assistance in
>  determining how to address the business needs.
>
>  It would obviously be important to make clear to endusers that
>  transactional mails are never sent from the corp.paypal.com
>  subdomain.

When corp.paypal.com uses ADSP dkim=all, bad actors will then find their 
phishing attempts accepted. These messages might include misleading 
List-ID headers to seem to an MTA as having been handled by a 
mailing-list.  The recipient is unlikely to notice these additional 
header fields and therefore remain vulnerable to phishing attempts that 
they thought were from paypal.

>  There is certainly an educational component required regardless of
>  which approach is selected. Any time there is a change in behavior on
>  the part of an abused domain it opens up the potential for abuse
>  specific to the changes involved.

The TPA-Label scheme should be able to mitigate phishing without better 
educating users, engaging in private arrangements, or to have 
mailing-lists change their handling in ways that would make their 
messages visually indistinguishable from user to user email, and 
therefore a greater risk in distributing phishing attempts. While 
phishing affects a small percentage of domains, it represents a 
significant financial threat eroding the productivity email may have 
otherwise offered.

-Doug




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