Domain Keys: Email Authentication

DomainKeys is a type of system used to authenticate emails being received. With email services not being able to control or at least prevent the reception of unwanted emails over different email accounts, DomainKeys may very well help ensure that emails are properly screened to know that they are authentic. And since there have been various threats to privacy as well as virus propagation through emails, email authentication has become an important tool that many organizations now use in order to keep themselves safe from getting unwanted as well as risky emails from unknown sources.

Email authentication tries to make verifying emails automatically as it is being transmitted so that recipients of the emails may have a way to know as well as verify the author as well as the origin of the received emails automatically. DomainKeys is an authentication technology that verifies the DNS domain of an incoming email as well as the integrity of the message to ensure that it was not altered in any way during transit.

DomainKeys offers a simple and effective means of ensuring almost the end to end integrity of email messages. This makes data received become more secure as well as accurate as how it was sent and received. DomainKeys adds a header known as the DomainKeys Signature which contains the digital signature of the contents of the email message.

When the email is sent, the receiving SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server then makes use of the DomainKeys header as well as the domain name of the email's origin and perform a DNS lookup. The data received from the lookup includes the domain's public key. The receiver then can decrypt the hash value found in the header field as well as the hash value of the message body that was received. If the two values match, this can prove that the email came from the supposed domain origin and was not being tampered with during transit.

One of the advantages of DomainKeys verification and authentication is that it allows recipient of the emails to identify the originating domain of the email sender. This can make phishing attacks easier to detect since their origins can be positively identified as well as can be blacklisted.

The DomainKeys authentication system also allows forged messages to be discarded as it is received through the email servers. It can either be discarded by software used by the end-user or by the Internet Service Providers themselves. And because the originating domain can be looked up using DomainKeys, abusive domain owners can be positively be identified and tracked instead of remaining unknown. DomainKeys can also help reduce an email recipient's time to go through email clutter by using the DomainKeys system to automatically drop forged email messages coming from a known blacklisted domain.