• If you can break DNS, you can get an NXDOMAIN reply, making recipients think there aren't any domainkeys
• If the domainkey private key is small, you can factor it. There's an article on HN's frontpage right now about this.
• If the server uses domainkeys, but it doesn't specifically verify the From: header, an attacker can still forge a message if they share a popular mail provider with their target. I don't know if this is still practical.
• Stupidity. DKIM is difficult to test, and as a security measure it would need to be tested.
An autoreponse confirmation would be immune to all of these attacks and would be trivial to implement correctly.
Comments
There are several ways to defeat DKIM here:
• If you can break DNS, you can get an NXDOMAIN reply, making recipients think there aren't any domainkeys
• If the domainkey private key is small, you can factor it. There's an article on HN's frontpage right now about this.
• If the server uses domainkeys, but it doesn't specifically verify the From: header, an attacker can still forge a message if they share a popular mail provider with their target. I don't know if this is still practical.
• Stupidity. DKIM is difficult to test, and as a security measure it would need to be tested.
An autoreponse confirmation would be immune to all of these attacks and would be trivial to implement correctly.
An auto-response confirmation would make posterous suck.
and yet DKIM is insecure for sender authentication.