Message Authentication Signature Standards (mass) Charter

Message Authentication Signature Standards (mass)

NOTE: This charter is a snapshot of the . It may now be out-of-date.

Last Modified: 2004-11-11

Chair(s):

Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb@nsb.fv.com>
Jim Fenton <fenton@cisco.com>

Security Area Director(s):

Russell Housley <housley@vigilsec.com>
Sam Hartman <hartmans-ietf@mit.edu>

Security Area Advisor:

Russell Housley <housley@vigilsec.com>

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Description of 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