A Large-scale and Longitudinal Measurement Study of DKIM Deployment

Authors: 

Chuhan Wang, Kaiwen Shen, and Minglei Guo, Tsinghua University; Yuxuan Zhao, North China Institute of Computing Technology; Mingming Zhang, Jianjun Chen, and Baojun Liu, Tsinghua University; Xiaofeng Zheng and Haixin Duan, Tsinghua University and Qi An Xin Technology Research Institute; Yanzhong Lin and Qingfeng Pan, Coremail Technology Co. Ltd

Abstract: 

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is an email authentication protocol to protect the integrity of email contents. It has been proposed and standardized for over a decade and adopted by Yahoo!, Google, and other leading email service providers. However, little has been done to understand the adoption rate and potential security issues of DKIM due to the challenges of measuring DKIM deployment at scale.

In this paper, we provide a large-scale and longitudinal measurement study on how well DKIM is deployed and managed. Our study was made possible by a broad collection of datasets, including 9.5 million DKIM records from passive DNS datasets over five years and 460 million DKIM signatures from real-world email headers. Moreover, we conduct an active measurement on Alexa Top 1 million domains. Our measurement results show that 28.1% of Alexa Top 1 million domains have enabled DKIM, of which 2.9% are misconfigured. We demonstrate that the issues of DKIM key management and DKIM signatures are prevalent in the real world, even for well-known email providers (e.g., Gmail and Mail.ru). We recommend the security community should pay more attention to the systemic problems of DKIM deployment and mitigate these issues from the perspective of protocol design.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {279894,
author = {Chuhan Wang and Kaiwen Shen and Minglei Guo and Yuxuan Zhao and Mingming Zhang and Jianjun Chen and Baojun Liu and Xiaofeng Zheng and Haixin Duan and Yanzhong Lin and Qingfeng Pan},
title = {A Large-scale and Longitudinal Measurement Study of {DKIM} Deployment},
booktitle = {31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 22)},
year = {2022},
isbn = {978-1-939133-31-1},
address = {Boston, MA},
pages = {1185--1201},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/wang-chuhan},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}

Presentation Video