On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 12:40 PM John Levine <jo...@taugh.com> wrote:
> It appears that Scott Kitterman <skl...@kitterman.com> said: > >My impression is that the group is generally okay with PSD=y. I prefer > it over your suggestion. My strongest preference is that we pick > something, stick with it, and move on. > > I think I see where Ale's confusion is coming from. If we switch to a > tree walk, we will have an algorithm rather than a heuristic, so > anyone looking at the same domains and the same set of DMARC records > will get the same result. It also occurs to me that in the absence of > a PSL-like thing, the idea of an organizational domain is no longer > useful. > > There's two questions to answer: what is the policy for a domain, and are > two domains in relaxed alignment. > > The answer to the first one is straightforward: start at the domain, walk > up the tree, and the first DMARC record > you find is the policy record. If you don't find one, there's no policy. > > The answer to the second has two cases: > > If one domain is a subdomain of the other, and there is no policy record > (or maybe no PSD policy record) between > them, they're in relaxed alignment. > I have no problem with this. Those of us who originally created DMARC considered this the use case for relaxed. > > If they are cousin domains, walk up the tree from each until you find a > policy record. If you find the same policy > record and it's not a PSD and it allows relaxed alignment, they're in > relaxed alignment. If you find different > records, or only one record, or no records, they aren't. > > I think a better term is sibling domains. The phrase "cousin domains" has typically been used for look alike domains rather than the subdomain issue. > As a special case, a domain with a PSD record is never aligned with > anything but itself. > (I realize .bank will never send mail, but us.com might.) > > The cousin domain rule doesn't exactly reproduce what the PSL is intended > to do, but I think it covers > the useful cases and is unlikely to allow accidental cousin alignment > which Mike keeps reminding us about. > It actually does allow malicious, not accidental, alignment. I'm done reminding. This allows an attack vector which can be useful for BEC attacks, hostile governments targeting NGOs, journalists, etc. and other targeted attacks. It is not a particularly useful attack vector for large scale opportunistic abuse such as spam or widespread attempts to spread malware. The group will address it or not as it chooses. I've been working on developing real world attack example (defanged) and have just started discussing the issue with various (red team) security folks I know and reaching out to some .gov folks I know. bSidesLV may be held this year and I may present on this there or at other venues. If allowing alignment and a pass based on a sibling domain is allowed in DMARC then the best defense is for people to understand that there are potential real world risks in relying on a DMARC pass in relaxed mode. Michael Hammer
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