A First Look at Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI)

Abstract As promising approaches to thwarting the damage caused by phishing emails, DNS-based email security mechanisms, such as Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) and Authentication of Named Entities (DANE), have been proposed widely adopted. Nevertheless, number victims emails continues increase, suggesting that there should be a mechanism for supporting end-users in correctly distinguishing from legitimate emails. To address this problem, standardization Brand Indicators Identification (BIMI) is underway. BIMI helps an recipient visually distinguish between With Google officially July 2021, approach shows signs spreading worldwide. these backgrounds, we conduct extensive measurement adoption its configuration. The results our study revealed that, November 2022, 3,538 out one million most popular domain names set record, whereas only 396 (11%) BIMI-enabled had valid logo images verified mark certificates. also existence several misconfigurations