The Internet Engineering Task Force, the group responsible for technical standards on the Internet, has approved e-mail authentication framework DomainKeys Identified Mail as proposed standard RFC 4871.
According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, close to 24,000 phishing scams were reported in the U.S. in February alone, with more than 100 top brands being forged.
DKIM is the result of a collaboration among organizations including Cisco, Sendmail and PGP Corporation. It gives message authentication, verification and traceability to help determine whether a message is legitimate. It also provides additional information to Internet service providers and consumers to help determine whether a message’s point of origin is legitimate.
Other standards used to authenticate mail are Sender Policy Framework Microsoft’s Sender ID framework. Microsoft reports that the application of Sender ID and reputation data has reduced false positives by over 85 percent, while increasing deliverability of legitimate e-mail by over 80 percent. Sender ID is currently used by more than 10 million domains.
