Concluded WG Message Authentication Signature Standards (mass)
Note: The data for concluded WGs is occasionally incorrect.
WG | Name | Message Authentication Signature Standards | |
---|---|---|---|
Acronym | mass | ||
Area | Security Area (sec) | ||
State | Concluded | ||
Charter | charter-ietf-mass-01 Approved | ||
Document dependencies | |||
Personnel | Chairs | Dr. Nathaniel S. Borenstein, Jim Fenton |
Final Charter for Working Group
Several proposals have recently been published for the signing of
messages,primarily email messages, to deter source address spoofing.
These include:
DomainKeys, draft-delany-domainkeys-base-00.txt
Identified Internet Mail, draft-fenton-identified-mail-00.txt
E-mail Postmarks, http://www.lessspam.org/EmailPostmarks.pdf
While the prevention of message spoofing is also a goal of the MARID
working group, cryptographic approaches to this problem are explicitly
outside the charter of MARID. Nevertheless, many that are familiar
with the address-based authorization approaches MARID is considering
consider them to be an interim step until message signing is deployed,
or as a complementary technology to be used along with message signing.
This BOF (and IETF Working Group formation, if there is sufficient
interest) will focus on standards for message signing, including:
- Signature format (syntax) and binding to message source dress
- Key management procedures
- Selection of message content to be signed (headers, etc.)
- Mechanisms for minimizing breakage as messages pass through the
mail
system
- Operation of message signing in concert with address-based
authorization