Yahoo and Cisco Systems have collaborated on an authentication technology that aims to thwart email forgery by verifying emails' address of origin.
The system, which combines the companies' crytography-based technologies - DomainKeys from Yahoo and Internet Identified Mail from Cisco - will be available to the industry royalty-free.
Called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), the technology uses public-key cryptography to allow users to verify message integrity and clearly identifies legitimate messages, according to Yahoo and Cisco.
With Yahoo's DomainKeys, the system sending email uses a private key to generate a signature and includes the signature in the email header. The receiving system uses the public key, which is published in the Domain Name System, to verify the signature of the email.
As reported last month, Swedish police arrested a teen in connection with the alleged theft of source code thought to belong to Cisco.
