With the Authentication Summit in Chicago, sponsored in part by Microsoft and chaired by Spiezle, the technology industry is reaching out to Fortune 500 businesses to tell them about e-mail authentication. Major airlines, financial institutions and insurance companies are looking for direction and advice, Spiezle said.
Companies with online businesses have been grappling to fight phishing, a prevalent type of online scam through which phishers attempt to steal sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card numbers. The schemes typically combine fraudulent spam e-mail and Web pages that look like legitimate sites.
Here's the lowdown on the main technologies that are out to clean up e-mail by identifying the source.
Sender ID
Brings together two previous security technologies: Caller ID for E-mail, introduced by Microsoft in February 2004, and SPF, developed by Meng Wong. Sender ID compliant e-mail requires an SPF tag in a Domain Name System record to identify valid machines sending mail from that domain.
SPF
Short for Sender Policy Framework. Both main versions of SPF records comply with Sender ID, but they verify a different "from" address. SPF 1 validates the sender data contained in the e-mail envelope data, which is typically only read by e-mail systems. SPF 2 verifies the "from" name displayed to the user. Industry experts advise companies to publish and use both.
DKIM
Merges Yahoo's DomainKeys with Cisco Systems' Internet Identified Mail. DKIM, or DomainKeys Identified Mail, relies on public key cryptography. It attaches a digital signature to outgoing e-mail so recipients can verify that the message comes from its claimed source.
Consumer faith in e-mail is falling, as its abuse for online scams is growing. If businesses don't sign up for Sender ID or similar technologies, that trend could continue and undermine e-mail's usefulness, authentication advocates say.
"E-mail is just getting more and more broken," said Dave Jevans, chairman of the Anti-Phishing Working Group, which includes banks, Internet service providers, law enforcement agencies and technology vendors among its members. "If there is no e-mail authentication, then you have to find some other way to communicate with your customer that is not e-mail."
eBay and its PayPal online payment unit, which are the source of more than a billion transaction-related e-mails a month, are among the biggest phishing targets. If e-mail authentication delivers on its promise, it could be a boon for eBay--but it is not there yet, Durzy said. It identifies the sender of the e-mail, but it does not do much to reassure the recipient about the reputation of the sender, he noted.
The ultimate benefits really are in the future applications of e-mail authentication, agreed Nicholas Graham, an AOL representative . "E-mail authentication has to be combined with accreditation and reputation services for a comprehensive look into the quality of mail coming from any source," he said.
Microsoft is already using such reputation-based filtering, Spiezle said. These systems look at the e-mail sending habits of a particular domain, for example CNET.com, and include that in the decision as to whether messages should be junked.
"In e-mail authentication, Sender ID is your driver's license. We know who you are, but we don't know if you're a good driver," Spiezle said. The reputation score is analogous to a driving record, he added. "If you have a lot of people complain about your mail being spam, you get a negative score."
Authentication technology helps bolster reputation systems by identifying the true source of the e-mail. Previously, assigning a reputation to a domain could be shaky, because the domain could be faked.
'More product, less hype'
Many in the industry are working on reputation technology. That includes Microsoft and e-mail security vendors such as CipherTrust, but also Meng Wong, the developer of the original Sender Policy Framework (SPF) specification, now part of Sender ID. Wong is now chief technology officer for special projects at e-mail forwarding company POBox.com.
Wong divorced himself from the SPF effort after SPF was folded together with Microsoft's Caller ID for E-mail into Sender ID. This time, he's careful to avoid the mistakes made during the authentication effort, he said. "We're going to try to get our act together as an industry before telling the world we're ready: More product, less hype."
With Hotmail, Microsoft has seen a marked increase in the number of e-mails that include an SPF record. Sender ID requires Internet service providers, companies and other Internet domain holders to publish such records to identify their mail servers. This can be challenging, especially for a large organization that may have systems sending mail in multiple countries, or may hire others to send mail for them, experts said.
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