research-article

Revisiting Email Forwarding Security under the Authenticated Received Chain Protocol

Authors:

Gang WangAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022

Pages 681 - 689

https://doi.org/10.1145/3485447.3512228

Published: 25 April 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Email authentication protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are used to detect spoofing attacks, but they face key challenges when handling email forwarding scenarios. Recently in 2019, a new Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) protocol was introduced to support mail forwarding applications to preserve the authentication records. After 2 years, it is still not well understood how ARC is implemented, deployed, and configured in practice. In this paper, we perform an empirical analysis on ARC usage and examine how it affects spoofing detection decisions on popular email provides that support ARC. After analyzing an email dataset of 600K messages, we show that ARC is not yet widely adopted, but it starts to attract adoption from major email providers (e.g., Gmail, Outlook). Our controlled experiment shows that most email providers’ ARC implementations are done correctly. However, some email providers (Zoho) have misinterpreted the meaning of ARC results, which can be exploited by spoofing attacks. Finally, we empirically investigate forwarding-based “Hide My Email” services offered by iOS 15 and Firefox, and show their implementations break ARC and can be leveraged by attackers to launch more successful spoofing attacks against otherwise well-configured email receivers (e.g., Gmail).

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Cited By

Hureau ODuda AKorczyński MGopalakrishnan VWang JAyyub Qazi ITyson G(2024)Stress Testing the DMARC Reporting System: Compliance with Standards and Ways of ImprovementProceedings of the 20th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies10.1145/3680121.3697809(1-9)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3680121.3697809
Hureau OBayer JDuda AKorczyński M(2024)Spoofed Emails: An Analysis of the Issues Hindering a Larger Deployment of DMARCPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-031-56249-5_10(232-261)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-56249-5_10
Ragheb MElmedany WSharif M(2023)The Effectiveness of DKIM and SPF in Strengthening Email Security2023 10th International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud)10.1109/FiCloud58648.2023.00068(422-426)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/FiCloud58648.2023.00068
Show More Cited By

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022

April 2022

3764 pages

ISBN:9781450390965

DOI:10.1145/3485447

Editors:
Frédérique Laforest
INSA Lyon, France
,
Raphaël Troncy
EURECOM, France
,
Elena Simperl
King’s College London, UK
,
Deepak Agarwal
Pinterest, USA
,
Aristides Gionis
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
,
Ivan Herman
W3C / retired
,
Lionel Médini
Université Lyon 1, France

Copyright © 2022 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 25 April 2022

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WWW '22: The ACM Web Conference 2022

April 25 - 29, 2022

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Cited By

Hureau ODuda AKorczyński MGopalakrishnan VWang JAyyub Qazi ITyson G(2024)Stress Testing the DMARC Reporting System: Compliance with Standards and Ways of ImprovementProceedings of the 20th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies10.1145/3680121.3697809(1-9)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3680121.3697809
Hureau OBayer JDuda AKorczyński M(2024)Spoofed Emails: An Analysis of the Issues Hindering a Larger Deployment of DMARCPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-031-56249-5_10(232-261)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-56249-5_10
Ragheb MElmedany WSharif M(2023)The Effectiveness of DKIM and SPF in Strengthening Email Security2023 10th International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud)10.1109/FiCloud58648.2023.00068(422-426)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/FiCloud58648.2023.00068
Liu EAkiwate GJonker MMirian AHo GVoelker GSavage S(2023)Forward Pass: On the Security Implications of Email Forwarding Mechanism and Policy2023 IEEE 8th European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)10.1109/EuroSP57164.2023.00030(373-391)Online publication date: Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSP57164.2023.00030

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