Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) is a proposed standard that have been developed to help address issues with DMARC and certain forwarders, such as mailing lists. It defines a standard for how to pass authentication results from one intermediary to another, making this information available to the recipient system. It works even in the case of multiple intermediaries, a.k.a. a chain
DMARC verifies the sender authenticity, as specified by the RFC5322.From header domain name, using SPF and DKIM. Certain indirect email flows such as mailing lists break this by altering the message, while maintaining the original From header. It causes issues for both senders that publish a DMARC policy, and receivers that verify DMARC. The two large mailbox providers AOL and Yahoo published a p=reject DMARC policy for their domains in 2014, causing some disruption for senders on those domains. It occurred when emailing recipients on mailbox services that verifies DMARC via for example mailing lists. This was, and still is, remedied by ad-hoc solutions.
ARC in itself isn’t a reputation system. The specification doesn’t define how the reputation of intermediates should be tracked, nor how public lists should be operated. In other words, as a recipient mailbox provider you still have to operate such systems in order to make use of the information that ARC provides. DMARC.org announced ARC at a M3AAWG meeting in Atlanta, 2015, where it’s been a frequent topic ever since.
include "authentication.header";
include "authentication.arc";
$chain = ARC::chainValidate();
if ($chain["status"] == "pass" or $chain["status"] == "none")
{
ARC::seal(
"201805", "example.com", "pki:arc",
$chain,
AuthenticationResults()
->SPF(["smtp.client-ip" => $senderip])
->DKIM()
->DMARC()
->addMethod("arc", $chain["status"], ["header.oldest-pass" => $chain["oldestpass"] ?? "0"])
->toString()
);
}
We have just released an implementation for ARC (draft 14) on Github, which supports both verification and (re)sealing. It’s written in Halon script, and we’re using it on our own domain to start with. If you’re interested in taking it for a spin, just let us know.