IETF Approves DKIM

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- In a combined effort to help combat e-mail forgery, phishing and other types of online fraud, technology industry leaders Cisco®, Yahoo!, Sendmail and PGP Corporation today announced that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the group responsible for technical standards on the Internet, has approved DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) as a proposed standard, RFC 4871. DKIM is an e-mail authentication framework that uses cryptographic signature technology to verify the domain of the sender.

According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, close to 24,000 phishing scams were reported in the U.S. in February 2007 alone, with more than 100 top brands being forged. DKIM provides businesses with heightened brand protection by providing message authentication, verification and traceability to help determine whether a message is legitimate. It also provides additional information to ISPs and consumers to help determine whether a message's point of origin is legitimate.

DKIM is the result of collaboration among numerous organizations. Now that DKIM has been approved as a proposed Internet standard, these companies will work closely with leading ISPs, enterprises, e-commerce organizations, financial institutions and the open source community to facilitate rapid adoption of the specification and its incorporation into future products and offerings.

Authoring Partners Comments:
"DKIM can improve users’ trust in e-mail and, in doing so, make the Internet a safer and more useful tool," said Jim Fenton, a distinguished engineer in Cisco's Technology Center and one of the authors of DKIM. "Cisco is proud of its role in helping lead the industry collaboration around this standard. Developing reputation-based and accreditation systems that incorporate this technology will create a safer online environment for users at work, at home and on the go.” -- Jim Fenton, Distinguished Engineer | Cisco

Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO)