Internet Drafts, Email Security Documents 
and Anti-Spam Research by William Leibzon

A lot of the documents here are done as part of my participation in IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) or its sister-organization IRTF (Internet Research Task Force)

General Email Security Research and Documents Related to Email Message Tracking

June 2005 - Email Security Anti-Spoofing Protection with Path and Cryptographic Authentication Methods - Paper that includes general overview of path authentication (MARID & SPF technologies), cryptographic authentication (MASS technologies), accreditation and reputation. Last part is proposal for how SPF or other path authentication technology can use data from cryptographic signatures and in this way bypass forwarding problems. Available are PDF and HTML versions of this paper. 

May 2005 - Content-Author and Content-Originator MIME Header Fields Draft - This draft defines new header fields Content-Author and Content-Originator which can be used with mail and http to identify name and email address of the author of the content and name and email address of the person responsible for distributing the content. This is kind of similar to purpose "From:" and "Sender:" serve for email message but applies to particular MIME part. Available are TXT, XML and HTML versions of this draft and official IETF-published version - draft-leibzon-content-author-originator-00.txt

April 2005 - Email Forwarding and Redirection Trace Headers Internet Draft - New version of the draft that defined "Redirected" trace header. Also available are TXT and XML versions of this draft and official IETF published version - draft-leibzon-emailredirection-traceheaders-01.txt

December 2004 - Email Security Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations  with Reference List of Email Security Standard

June 2005 - SMTP Extension for Advertisement of External-Body Content Retrieval Capability - Draft that proposes extension to SMTP to allow automatic content retrieval with standard Message/External-Body MIME type. A trace header field to record information about retrieved data is also included. Available are TXT, XML and HTML versions of this draft and official IETF-published version - draft-leibzon-smtp-retrievecontent-00.txt

November 2004 - Email Forwarding and Redirection Trace Headers Internet Draft - A draft that defined "Redirected:" email header for use by automated forwarding and redirection agents (forwarders, mail lists) to indicate the changes they make to email message. Also available is PDF version of this document and official IETF published text of this draft - draft-leibzon-emailredirection-traceheaders-00.txt

July 2004 - Securing Email Path - Greatly improved (50% new slides) version of earlier Email Path Verification presentation, reworked in July 2004. Also available is PDF version of this presentation

IETF/IRTF ASRG (Anti-Spam Research Group) related documents

For more information about Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) please see http://asrg.sp.am/

June 2003 - Summarized list of most interesting posts at ASRG mail list from March 2003 to May 2003

May 2003 - Email Path Verification (PDF) - Presentation prepared for May 2003 meeting of ASRG

IETF MASS (Mail Automated Signature Service) related documents

July 2005 - Content Digest and EDigest Header Fields - Draft describes two new header fields (to replace greatly outdated Content-MD5) for including cryptographic hash of MIME part in the message with support for multiple cryptographic algorithms, multiple canonicalization methods, ability to include header fields in the hash data and other new features. This is part of META-Signature proposal but can be used entirely independent of it. Available are TXT, XML and HTML versions of this draft and official IETF-published version - draft-leibzon-content-digest-edigest-00.txt

June 2005 - Email Security Anti-Spoofing Protection with Path and Cryptographic Authentication Methods - Paper that includes general overview of path authentication (MARID & SPF technologies), cryptographic authentication (MASS technologies), accreditation and reputation. Last part is proposal for how SPF or other path authentication technology can use data from cryptographic signatures and in this way bypass forwarding problems. Available are PDF and HTML versions of this paper. 

January 2005 - META Signatures website has been released, all subsequent technical documents and presentations on META signatures will appear on that site.

January 2005 - META (Mail Enhancements for Transmission Authorization) Signatures Proposal Technical Overview (document spec v0.18)

December 2004 - META (Mail Enhancements for Transmission Authorization) Signatures Proposal Technical Overview (document spec v0.17)

November 2004 - META (Mail Enhancements for Transmission Authorization) Signatures Proposal Technical Overview (document spec v0.11)

October 2004 - Comparison Matrix for Automated Email Signature Proposals discussed at IETF MASS BoF (last revised in January 2005, original version is available here)

September 2004 - Email Signing Proposals Compared to MTA Signatures (PDF) - Brief comparison of several recent automated email signing proposals (Yahoo DomainKeys, Identified Mail, Microsoft Email Postmarks) to MTA Signatures

August 2004 - MTA Signatures Email Security Model and Proposal - Research paper and proposal on how email servers can attach X.509 based cryptographic signatures that can be used by other mail servers and by mail clients to verify email path and source of email messages.

August 2004 - MTA Signatures - Brief Overview (PDF) - Presentation for IETF60 Message Authentication and Signature Standards (MASS) BOFF

IETF MARID (Mail Authentication Records in DNS) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework) related documents

For more information about SPF (Sender Policy Framework) please see http://spf.pobox.com/

June 2005 - Email Security Anti-Spoofing Protection with Path and Cryptographic Authentication Methods - Paper that includes general overview of path authentication (MARID & SPF technologies), cryptographic authentication (MASS technologies), accreditation and reputation. Last part is proposal for how SPF or other path authentication technology can use data from cryptographic signatures and in this way bypass forwarding problems. Available are PDF and HTML versions of this paper. 

April 2005 - Email Forwarding and Redirection Trace Headers Internet Draft - New version of the draft that defined "Redirected" trace header. Also available are TXT and XML versions of this draft and official IETF published version - draft-leibzon-emailredirection-traceheaders-01.txt

November 2004 - Email Forwarding and Redirection Trace Headers Internet Draft - A draft that defined "Redirected:" email header for use by automated forwarding and redirection agents (forwarders, mail lists) to indicate the changes they make to email message. This maybe of some use for SPF specifications. Available is also PDF version of this document and official IETF published text of this draft - draft-leibzon-emailredirection-traceheaders-00.txt

October 2004 - Responsible Submitter Internet Draft A draft based on former MARID WG concept of Email Responsible Submitter but done entirely RFC2821 identity with no requirement of PRA header checking. This is intended to be input for SPF Community. Also available is PDF version of this document and official IETF published text of this draft - draft-leibzon-responsible-submitter-00.txt

September 2004 - Email Networks and Responsible Submitter Another version of Responsible Submitter draft based on concept of email networks. In this document Submitter is both RFC2821 identity (SUBMITTER) and RFC2822 header (Submitted-By). 


To contact author of these documents please send email to william@elan.net