Google this week announced several new security features for its G Suite services, and the most notable for Gmail users is a pilot of an email specification that allows brand logos to display within authenticated emails.
Brand Indications for Message Identification (BIMI) is developed by the AuthIndicators Working Group, and requires emails to pass Google's anti-abuse validation, after which it brands the incoming message with a logo of the company that sent it.
Our BIMI pilot will enable organizations, who authenticate their emails using DMARC, to validate ownership of their corporate logos and securely transmit them to Google. Once these authenticated emails pass all of our other anti-abuse checks, Gmail will start displaying the logo in existing avatar slots in the Gmail UI.
By authenticating messages using the existing DMARC system and requiring strong authentication, the spec aims to give users and email security systems increased confidence in the source of emails while creating a trusted brand presence.
Google says it will be starting the BIMI pilot in the coming weeks with a limited number of senders. To learn more about BIMI, you can visit the working group's website.
Top Rated Comments
Also, I'm sure there's some subtle irony in using CNN in their graphic...
Why? It doesn't protect from lookalike domains. Everyone can setup a lookalike domain like "macrumrs.com" and setup BIMI on that, put the MR logo. SPF, DKIM, DMARC... all of that will pass with flying colors. S/MIME signing has the same issue.
As for BIMI: We don't need any further protection from fake "FROM:" emails. Spoofed emails end up in the junk anyway thanks to SPF and possibly DKIM.
All of this nonsense could be eliminated when the sending server simply signs the emails using a (manually) validated cert for the sending domain.
However, there are to many backward people that think that, before touching the core of the mail-server they rather build another system around it. For example, Microsoft doesn't even support DKIM on Microsoft Exchange Server.