On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 4:10 AM Alessandro Vesely <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Sat 19/Apr/2025 18:51:38 +0200 Allen Robinson wrote:
> > On Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 9:02 a.m. Alessandro Vesely <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > [...]
> > * I base64 decoded this MIME part.
> > * I inserted bytes N-M
> > * I trimmed the text "foobar" starting at byte N
> > * I base64 encoded the MIME part
>
>
> I would prefer to use a class of "good" transformations, such as the
> subject,
> footer, mimeify, add-part and mime-wrap of draft-kucherawy-dkim-transform,


I also like the idea of mime part algebra as an addition to text algebra to
remove the need to do base64 transformation.  +1 to looking more into
draft-kucherawy-dkim-transform.  I don't understand your earlier concern
around quoted printable and algebra.


> and
> one "complex" transformation to be defined on a byte-by-byte basis.
>

Can you expand what you mean by this?

> [...]
> >> If verifiers can't judge how acceptable a change is, change tracking
> will be
> >> relegated to forensic analysis.  That means we won't be able to
> distinguish
> >> mailing lists from spammers and replayers, and we won't have solved
> anything.
> >
> > I disagree, or maybe I'm working with a different idea of what forensic
> > analysis means. Doing content filtering at SMTP transaction time based
> on
> > the results of authentication checks is certainly possible without the
> > authentication mechanism being able to decide whether the content is
> > malicious or not.
>
>
> "Malicious" is a misnomer here. The characteristic of the "good"
> transformations above is that they are attributable to a typical mailing
> list
> transformation; that is, non-invasive and respectful of the original
> content.
> If the verifier can determine this, it can override dmarc=fail.
>
> If the transformation is a complete replacement of the body, a dmarc=fail
> deserves to be rejected, according to policy.
>

It's risky to throw around subjective terminology that's very similar to
the notion of "trust" i.e. "good transformations".  I think the "algebra"
concept is more helpfully  thought of as identifying which of the content
is created by whom and not worrying which mutation happened.

-Wei
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