Towards the Adoption of Anti-spoofing Protocols for Email Systems
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Email spoofing is a critical step of phishing, where the attacker impersonates someone the victim knows or trusts. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative study to explore why email spoofing is still possible after years of efforts to develop and deploy anti-spoofing protocols (e.g., SPF, DKIM, DMARC). First, we measure the protocol adoption by scanning 1 million Internet domains. We find the adoption rates are still low, especially for the new DMARC (3.1 collect 4293 discussion threads (25.7K messages) from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a working group formed to develop and promote Internet standards. Our analysis shows key security and usability limitations in the protocol design, which makes it difficult to generate a positive "net effect" for a wide adoption. We validate our results by interviewing email administrators and discuss key implications for future anti-spoofing solutions.
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