Yahoo!, Cisco to promote DomainKeys as a standard

By Steve Malone

Posted on 13 Jul 2005 at 11:06

Cisco and Yahoo have submitted their anti-spam technology DomainKeys to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for approval as a standard.

DomainKeys technology was developed by Yahoo! and is based on the concept of authentication between mail servers. Owners of mail servers transmit encrypted 'public' and 'private' key that identifies them to each other. The public key is registered at the DNS level while the private key is held on the mail server itself.

When a company sends out email it adds the private key to the header. The receiving email server then checks that the private header on the incoming email matches the 'public' key. If there is a match, then the email is assumed to come from the authentic source. If not, it is assumed to be spoofed.

The system is entirely transparent to the user who should only notice a reduction in spam and phishing exploits.

'This is a big milestone for us and the email authentication world,' Miles Libbey, an anti-spam product manager at Yahoo! Mail, said, 'This submission to the IETF represents collaboration between a lot of players in the email authentication world.'

Yahoo! says that among those companies which support the technology are Alt-N Technologies, America Online, EarthLink, IBM, Microsoft and VeriSign.

Microsoft itself has been promoting a rival SenderID technology.. while the company has been implementing the system for its own email services, its attempts at establishing it as a standard have run aground. The problems have arisen due to Microsoft's insistence on retaining the intellectual rights to certain key parts of the technology. Others have become concerned that a fundamental part of the DNS, which underpins the entire internet, would become reliant on proprietary Microsoft code. In contrast, Yahoo! has said that it will offer DomainKeys on a royalty free basis. Whether this is good enough for the IETF, we shall see.