Authors
Zakir Durumeric, David Adrian, Ariana Mirian, James Kasten, Elie Bursztein, Nicolas Lidzborski, Kurt Thomas, Vijay Eranti, Michael Bailey, J Alex Halderman
Publication date
2015/10/28
Book
Proceedings of the 2015 Internet Measurement Conference
Pages
27-39
Description
The SMTP protocol is responsible for carrying some of users' most intimate communication, but like other Internet protocols, authentication and confidentiality were added only as an afterthought. In this work, we present the first report on global adoption rates of SMTP security extensions, including: STARTTLS, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. We present data from two perspectives: SMTP server configurations for the Alexa Top Million domains, and over a year of SMTP connections to and from Gmail. We find that the top mail providers (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook) all proactively encrypt and authenticate messages. However, these best practices have yet to reach widespread adoption in a long tail of over 700,000 SMTP servers, of which only 35% successfully configure encryption, and 1.1% specify a DMARC authentication policy. This security patchwork---paired with SMTP policies that favor failing open to allow …
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Scholar articles
Z Durumeric, D Adrian, A Mirian, J Kasten, E Bursztein… - Proceedings of the 2015 Internet Measurement …, 2015