Originally published June 16 2005
Yahoo and Cisco join forces to battle spam, strengthen blockers
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
According to an article in The Standard, Cisco Systems Inc. and Yahoo announced this week that they will begin working together within anti-spam technologies to create a new email authentication system, which will combine the best elements of both companies' encryption software.
Yahoo Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. are combining their antispam technologies to create a new e-mail authentication system, they announced this week.
The system, called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), will draw on Yahoo's DomainKeys authentication technology and Cisco's Internet Identified Mail.
The technology will be offered to other industry players on a royalty-free basis in an effort to reduce the amount of spam spread across the Internet, the companies said.
Yahoo's DomainKeys uses public-key cryptography to authenticate the sender of an e-mail at the domain level.
The sending system generates a signature and inserts it in the e-mail header while the receiving system verifies the signature using a public key published in the Domain Name System.
Cisco's authentication technology also uses cryptography but associates the signature with the message itself.
In its system, the sending server signs the message and inserts the signature and pubic key used to create it in a new and additional header.
It will use the Domain Name System in the same manner as DomainKeys, to verify signatures using the published public key, but will also draw on Cisco's header signing technology to ensure consistency as messages are sent through the system.
It wasn't immediately clear how the new technology would fit in with the companies' prior work on authentication systems, however.
Yahoo has already implemented DomainKeys into its Yahoo Mail service and offers the technology royalty-free to other industry players.
The Sunnyvale, California, Internet company said that it receives more than 350 million messages a day signed by DomainKeys, but did not say whether it plans to replace the technology once DKIM becomes available.
As for Cisco, it released an open source implementation of Identified Internet Mail late last year.
All content posted on this site is commentary or opinion and is protected under Free Speech. Truth Publishing LLC takes sole responsibility for all content. Truth Publishing sells no hard products and earns no money from the recommendation of products. NaturalNews.com is presented for educational and commentary purposes only and should not be construed as professional advice from any licensed practitioner. Truth Publishing assumes no responsibility for the use or misuse of this material. For the full terms of usage of this material, visit www.NaturalNews.com/terms.shtml