Matthew Tse via mailop <[email protected]> writes:

> It seems there is some debate over whether forwarders should sign DKIM
> or not for forwarded email. Kind of a question on if we want to take
> "ownership" of this email.

Not really.  The confusion was over whether your system was adding its
own DKIM signature to the email, as is normal, or removing the existing
one and replacing it with its own.  The latter would be the wrong thing
to do, as it would be sure to make DMARC fail: SPF would already be out
of alignment, because of the forwarding, and removing the DKIM signature
that the originating system added would make DKIM fail.

As long as you don't alter the email body, or the headers that the DKIM
signature applies to, the original signature will still be valid after
the email is forwarded.

As for "taking ownership", that's not a good description.  A DKIM
signature is just a cryptographic fingerprint of the email body and a
selection of its headers (including "From:"), made using a secret key
belonging to the domain doing the signing, and verifiable using a public
key posted to that domain's DNS zone.  What the signature says is that
if you, later, can still correctly verify the signature, then the parts
of the message that the signer looked at have not been changed.  DMARC
adds the assumption that an MTA will not send out an email purporting to
be from someone in its own domain, which it holds the secret key for,
without knowing that it's not a forgery.  In other words, it assumes
that MTAs are correctly configured, and not, for instance, open relays
that anyone can connect to in order to forge email.

So, any valid DKIM signature says that the message passed through the
signing domain, and has not been altered since then.  A valid DKIM
signature that's aligned with the From: address additionally says that
the signing system trusts the source of the email, and believes that the
address in the From: header is genuine.

-tih
-- 
The creation of the state of Israel was a regrettable mistake.  It is
time to undo this mistake, and finally re-establish a free Palestine.
_______________________________________________
mailop mailing list
[email protected]
https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop

Reply via email to