Subject: [Asrg] META Signatures - New Website, Mail-Lists, Techical Spec Updates

From: "william(at)elan.net" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 05:21:54 -0800 (PST)

I've now had time to create webpages for META Signatures project and cleanup
tech documentation. All current info and documentation is now available at 
http://www.metasignatures.org

There are also two mail lists setup:
 http://lists.metasignatures.org/mailman/listinfo/metasig-discuss
   for general discussions regarding the proposal and its syntax
 http://lists.metasignatures.org/mailman/listinfo/metasig-develop
   for development and implementation discussion, in particular this
   would be mail list for those who want to get involved in metasignatures
   sourceforge project which has also been setup
 http://forums.metasignatues.org/
   web forum access to the same mail lists (yes, they are integrated and
   posts to mail lists show to go forum and other way around).

I invite those of you who are interested to participate and in particular 
I'm going to try to get started first on EDigest as that would allow to
test how well signatures can survive in real mail environment (and actual 
signature crypto staff should then be easy to add and it is well known to 
work anyway; for authorization I expect to focus on x509 and/or DNS
fingerprints). Note though, that META Signatures is actually just a small 
part of a lot larger email system proposal which I've started trying to 
describe directly as internet drafts and those drafts may be taking lot 
of my time for next 2-4 months, which will cut in the time I can spare 
for programming.

For technical spec the most current one can be found at
 http://www.metasignatures.org/meta_signatures_v018.htm
I've cleaned up small grammer errors and also made some style changes so 
it would be easier to read. There have also been number of technical 
changes  from last time I've posted about meta signatures here. Here is 
list of some changes briefly:

 1. META-Auth headers now use URL syntax for location information:
     META-Auth: s=x509  u="http://_certs.example.com/filename1.cer"  
     META-Auth: s=kr-dns u="dns:WDQGpekHKCmKyKWk._krs.example.com&TYPE=KR"
     META-Auth: s=pk-dktxt u="dns:_key1._dk.example.com?type=TXT"
     META-Auth: s=pgp u="http://pgp.example.net:11371/pks/" m=pgpmime-signature

 2. EDigest header has several new additions allowing to add headers from
    mime part and be more specific about how hash is created including list
    specific mime parts in order
 
 3. For reporting results of the verification Authentication-Results header
    is used used with some additions to how it was specified in draft

 4. For dns authorization its proposed to use new DNS RR for fingerprint
    data but with it having exactly the same format as SSHFP RR described
    at http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-secsh-dns-05.txt.
    An example of this for dns zone is something like (Note: MASFP stands 
    for MAil Signature Fingerprint)
  fp1._fp.example.com   IN    MASFP  1  1  123456789abcdef67890123456789abc

---
William Leibzon, Elan Networks:
 mailto: [email-masked]
Anti-Spam and Email Security Research Worksite:
 http://www.elan.net/~william/emailsecurity/

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